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I went to a concert of South Indian classical music at Cooper Union yesterday. This was clarinet accompanied by a kind of oboe (a nadaswaram, about four feet long, quite rare in North America) and two thavils (large double-headed drums).

Clarinet is not something that generally excites me: it’s the kind of instrumentBob from Accounting plays on the nights he goes wild. But this was very different. This was wild, challenging and sensuous, almost reminding me of modern jazz. Except of course it wasn’t. No western scale, and in place of complex harmony there is complex polyrhythm. And the improvisatory style is different.

I’ve always had problems following Indian polyrhythms: it’s probably something you have to grow up with to feel intuitively, but I think I managed well enough this time, because the musicians were also visibly keeping the time through the tala cycle.

Later in the evening I discovered that a coffee house I used to go to in Hong Kong has opened branches in New York. So I went in and relived my wild youth with an order of ginger tea (this stuff makes the inside of the body tingle, and I am now immune from disease for the next several weeks).