Music, Risk and Reinventing Tradition | Mahesh Kale on Cyrus Says

Description

We have Mahesh Kale on the show which means, for once, there is an actual National Film Award-winning musician in the room. How this happened, we’re still investigating.Mahesh talks about growing up in Pune, learning music through bhajans and family, and then doing the sensible middle-class thing: becoming an engineer. He went all the way to America, completed his master’s and was perfectly placed to live the Silicon Valley dream. Naturally, he walked away from it to become a classical musician.He tells us about the emotional encounter after a concert that changed the way he looked at his own talent, how teaching music helped him pay the bills, and how Katyar Kaljat Ghusali eventually brought him a National Film Award and a much bigger audience.We also get into Abhangwari, the wisdom of saint poetry and Mahesh’s mission to make Indian classical music relevant to younger listeners without turning it into something unrecognisable.And because this is Cyrus Says, the conversation somehow moves from tanpuras and tradition to Tesla, artificial intelligence, EDM, Messi, Neymar, cricket in America and whether classical music belongs in a nightclub.There is philosophy, sport, terrible jokes, a music quiz and even some singing at the end, which we managed to get for free.Watch the full episode with Mahesh Kale and Cyrus Broacha.