Man With Sign, September 12, 02025I woke with the alarm and moved efficiently through my pre-vigil coffee, somehow managing to get out of the house in the chilly morning and arriving at Roosevelt Circle at 7:29.

Traffic is very light and there are frequent interludes of empty road. The drivers who do acknowledge us are friendly, but most of the time they speed by, focused on the road, their work, the coming weekend. No matter; I'm leaning on the guardrail and singing, staying as present in the moment as I can.

2/

Today is the last day of practice in the Charukeshi vilambit khyal, "kaase kahoon aali," and I am spending the hour doing free improvisations — taking the composition as much for granted as possible in order to move into melodic variations. At first I focus on extemporizing while keeping the words in essentially the same relationship to the taal, but after the first ten or eleven minutes I take incrementally more liberties with each cycle.

3/

Over the course of the hour I practice developing the raga upwards into the opening of the antara. Normally this would only happen once during a vilambit exposition, so for the sake of practice I recapitulate the development multiple times, again striving to sing freely with only the necessary degree of reliance on the composition. The antara is finally "settling" — allowing more interpretive freedom.

4/

Solving small problems along the way, I build more and more complex melodic arcs, working on distortions of the mukhda to fit in longer and shorter time-frames, on interesting fractional subdivisions (I really get into interpolated 5-against-2 melismata for a while), and on rhythmically articulated silences (not a common perspective in the Hindustani universe, but a worthwhile one).

5/

At 8:23 I make a video, then sing with Craige for our duet. Barring a few very minor textual hiccups, the song works well. Craige's been practicing his harmony part and I have enough bandwidth to hear (and appreciate) it. We finish and the clock is just turning 8:29, so I pack up my signs and speaker.

6/

We part ways at the intersection, heading to our respective homes. This has been a tumultuous week in the outside world; for my part I've completed a big project (podcast episode to be released on the 15th — search for "Cool Tunes For A Hot Planet" and enjoy), taught a whole lot of students, led a good class, and done my daily resistance duties.

Walking, they say, is just controlled falling forward.

See you tomorrow.

Man With Sign

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