<\/a>Kishan Pandya remembers when, as a 12-year-old growing up in India, he discovered the jaltarang while attending an after-school program . \u201cI was fascinated,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\nA musical instrument, the jaltarang consists of a set of porcelain bowls, that are \u201ctuned\u201d by reducing or adding water. The musician strikes the bowls with bamboo sticks to create a distinct percussive sound\u2014a ringing, ushered in by a plunk, like that of a xylophone. In Hindi, \u201cjal\u201d means water and \u201ctarang\u201d means wave.<\/p>\n
Pandya grew up in a musical home. All seven of his older siblings played instruments or sang. He played the jaltarang for pleasure as he grew up, and while attending medical school at Baroda Medical College in Vadodara, India. With no formal training on the instrument, Pandya taught himself to play popular Bollywood songs, which he performed for friends and family, and occasionally with other musicians for social functions.<\/p>\n
But he didn\u2019t have much time for the jaltarang during his career in medicine. For 30 years, he says, he barely touched the instrument. Then, after retiring from clinical practice in 2009, he took it up again.<\/p>\n
Shortly after he returned to the instrument, he connected with Eastman School of Music faculty John Beck, a professor emeritus of percussion, and Bill Cahn, an associate professor of percussion, and participated in the Percussion Rochester festival in 2011 with Rohan Krishnamurthy, a graduate student from the Eastman School of Music. They performed an \u201cIndian\u201d version of Dave Brubeck\u2019s hit Take Five.<\/em><\/p>\nSince 2009 he has also extended his repertoire beyond Bollywood and into classical and jazz. During the 2014 Rochester Fringe Festival, he performed Antonio Vivaldi\u2019s \u00a0Concerto for Lute in D major (RV 93), <\/em>and also the slow movement of the Winter concerto form the Four Seasons<\/em> with Publick Musick\u2014a Rochester-based period-instrument ensemble that presents historically informed performances of music from the 17th and 18th centuries and beyond.<\/p>\nAnd while he gets a lot of personal enjoyment from playing the jaltarang and trying new genres, he also shares his talent with his family, writing and recording a \u201cditty,\u201d as he calls it, for each of his grandchildren for their birthdays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
URMC’s Kishan Pandya kicks off this season’s \u201cHidden Passions: Inspiring Conversations about Hyphenated Lives,\u201d a series sponsored by Memorial Art Gallery to showcase Rochesterians whose lives feature intriguing and unusual creative outlets. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273032,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[29502,936,18432],"class_list":["post-273002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-featured-post-side","tag-memorial-art-gallery","tag-school-of-medicine-and-dentistry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Hidden passions, creative lives<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n