Friends Music Festival

The night before, I spent nearly the entire night at the venue overseeing the stage setup. Next morning was back at about 8 am to see the final branding and other issues that needed attention and was in office for a 9 am meeting to put together final details and responsibilities that needed to be assigned to people at the venue. 12 noon I was back at Nazrul Manch, with only 6 hours to go before we kicked off Friends Music Festival 2009. Last minute details had to be sorted. Sound and light was in place. A last minute recce of the venue posed a huge problem. The front gate didn’t have an ounce of jute. This year’s concept was Jute and our commitment to being an environment friendly organisation. A couple of calls and after running helter-skelter we managed to get together several metres of bright orange Jute and masked the entire front gate walls. It was 4.30 pm now and the first set of musicians had arrived. We were good to go.

At 5.30 pm both the gates were opened and we had people trickling in and as the clock struck 6 we kicked off with the choir DAKSHINEE. Rabindrasangeet was the mainstay of day one’s offering. So after their performance, LOPAMUDRA followed by SRABONI SEN also continued with Rabindrasangeet.

The next set of performers bowled me over with their colourful attire and even more vibrant performance. It was probably the second time in my life I was witnessing Baul. The two artists BAUL SWAPAN ADHIKARI & BAUL BHAJAN DAS BAIRAGI with their accompaniment upped the mood of the audience just enough for them to enjoy a brilliant performance by PANDIT AJOY CHAKRABORTY with his vocal renditions of two ragas.

Day one ended with a sigh of relief, though we had an audience of about 1000+ in this 3000+ capacity venue, it was a great start to the Friends Music Festival.

DAKSHINEE

LOPAMUDRA MITRA

SRABONI SEN

BAUL SWAPAN ADHIKARI
BAUL BHAJAN DAS BAIRAGI

PANDIT AJOY CHAKRABORTY

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