Ever since I first heard her voice I have been in love with Ramamani.
I’ve never actually set eyes on her—let alone met her—though on one occasion, a few years ago, I came pretty close. I was in Karlsruhe, in Germany, to see Rabih Abou-Khalil; two days later—two days after I left—she was playing there with the Karnataka College of Percussion.
I first heard her sing on a record by saxophonist Charlie Mariano, featuring the Karnataka College. A subsequent, even better album recorded the same three-way collaboration during a live performance. As far as I know she has not recorded a solo album of classical Indian vocal, but now there’s another chance to hear her, on the new Mariano CD, Bangalore. In truth it’s not a great record. Whereas their previous collaborations were forward-looking, groundbreaking, some of the “jazzy” elements in the new material—especially the intrusively obsolete electric bass—drag the project back to the woeful days of fusion. All that is best about the record derives from Ramamani, who, as Mariano says in the liner notes, is her usual exquisite self. Less happily, from my point of view, it turns out that Rama is married to T. A. S. Mani, principal of the Karnataka College!
Perhaps, then, I should rephrase my claim to be in love with his wife. To do this—to convey the sound of a voice in words—I need, as it were, to be objectively personal. I love Ramamani’s voice because it is beautiful. And her voice is beautiful because, in it, I hear, vividly, everything about the woman I love. So: Ramamani’s is the voice of the beloved in all her specialness.
Her voice is especially beautiful because she is trained in Indian—specifically Karnatak or south Indian—classical music, and it is in Indian classical that the female voice as an instrument of music (rather than as a vehicle of verbal intent) has found supreme expression. I hear an objection: “What about Callas?”
Lear recalls Cordelia’s voice as being “ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.” Callas furiously disputes this claim, usurping the sovereign role for herself. Even when she is giddy with happiness, spiraling away in one of those bel canto equivalents of the “pretty, I’m so pretty” ditty from West Side Story, there is an implicit ambition to surpass all previous claims to happiness, an overvaulting urge to tragic supremacy; Callas wants to overwhelm, to conquer. This is what made her a great singer and gave her performances their vertiginous intensity. There is, consequently, nothing girlish about her.
One of the sad things about British life is that women, after a certain age, are almost obliged to wear their hair short. Among the audiences at Indian concerts and recitals, by contrast, there are many sixty- and seventy-year-old women with lovely, long gray hair. Their hair is a visual equivalent of the inherent gaiety that can be heard in all the great Indian female singers (who, as the devastated, wonder-struck Othello says of Desdemona, “can sing the savageness out of a bear”). Lakshmi Shankar, for example, was born in 1926; when she performed in London a few years ago she looked, at first, somewhat grand, stern, but, as she sang, the years fell from her. Her voice was skipping, girly, light-footed.
William Gedney articulated the music he heard on the subcontinent in similarly visual terms. For him, thumri, one of the styles of light classical singing at which Lakshmi Shankar excels, was “the swinging gait of young girls in saris.” And so it is: even when it is sung by a woman in her seventies. In the otherwise stupidly contrived film Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, there is a nice moment when Andy Garcia hits on Gabrielle Anwar by complimenting her on the way she walks: “Most girls simply plod along, you, on the other hand, you glide.” That is how Ramamani walks. Nietzsche—who believed that “what is good is light; whatever is divine moves on tender feet”—would have loved her.
At the very least, her voice could have diminished his terrible loneliness. If you are in the midst of a long period of being single, girlfriend-less, Ramamani persuades you that there is a woman, somewhere in the world, whom you will come to love. Thus one speaks not only of the charm but also of the promise of her voice. (Again, a comparison with Callas is instructive: her voice was like a promise so great it could only be broken.) The importance of faithfulness and constancy in relationships is often debated. But there is another, far rarer kind of constancy: to remain faithful to your deepest longing, to the idea that there exists someone who will be everything to you. Ramamani’s voice enables you to keep faith with this ideal.
In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of “Our Song.” The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is “like the most subtle hello.” Ramamani’s voice is the response to this call; it is Laurie’s hand reaching for her husband’s as they listen. Ramamani tells us not only what it is like to love, but also what it is like to be loved.
When I hear her voice, darling, I feel your hand in mine.
(for Vesna)
1999