Ode on an accomplished musician

(Published in the New India Express, Review, Saturday, April 20, 2002)

K V Narayana Swamy's style of rendering Carnatic music was at once brisk and leisurely, and covered the entire gamut of Carnatic aesthetics. He was dear to the music rasikas of Keralam because his accent had something that went along with Malayali psyche, and also because he was in the forefront in popularizing Swathi Thirunal krithis and various other Malayalam krithis.

As some elderly rasikas opine, KVN had two phases in his career as a vocalist. In the first phase he was a young performer accompanying his great guru Ariyakkudi Ramanujam Iyyankar (who set the current concert pattern without eschewing any element of music). This was the early part of his four decade long oeuvre in Carnatic music. And it is the KVN of the second phase we are all familiar with – a priest of soothing ragas. While the early KVN was with full of vigour and inventiveness, the later KVN was a matured and balanced singer.

KVN had a good audience abroad, especially among US settled Malayalees. They were very fond of him. Many of them, his admirers, have been circulating KVN's tapes (private collection of his live concerts) within their circle. Thanks to their efforts, a few people in Keralam too could listen to those rare moments of KVN's live performances. Listening to these tapes is a great experience, one that brings us into contact with the genius KVN was. His raga alapa and raga rendition were of utmost brilliance. But his real expertise was in the rendition of niravals . It was his immaculate exposition of ragas in niravals of high quality that earned him a respectable position among the toppers.

He used to render niraval mostly in the upper octave, and quite often above the upper panchama .

His mellifluous voice would soar high up in the third octave all through the slow paced niraval , as if in a continuous ascent into high pitches. KVN, it seems, was at home in the sancharas of high pitch. His voice achieves a rare beauty when he meditatively plays with niraval patterns around thara panchama .

Young KVN used to indulge more in explorations of the possibilities of niraval in slow tempo than the usual madyama kala niravl. His niraval in Sree Subramaniaya (Kamboji), a Dikshithar krithi he often rendered, was the most splendorous of them all. This is not known to many, except a small group who had the opportunity to listen to those tapes and the elderly rasikas who had been to his early concerts in the 1960s and 70s.

To understand KVN fully one needs to have experienced both these two phases of his much accomplished career. Unfortunately, most of the rasikas were unaware of the young KVN.