Sitaria

Front-page of the world’s largest read daily, 55 000 000 prints daily, Jagran 

Translation: Playing Sitar in Book Fair On Tuesday in the Deoghar Book Fair and Cultural Festival, Mr. Uwe Neumann, a german national, played sitar. We were informed that in the year 2000 he played sitar on the ghat of the Ganges in Kashi (Varanasi). Shri Narendra Modi (now prime minister of India) organised the programme. H.H. the Dalai Lama also was present in the programme (details on page 4).

German guitar man Uwe Neumann, 33, discovered the sitar in a most unusual fashion. As he walked down a crowded Benares lane 10 years back, a stranger approached him and offered free lessons in sitar. Neumann, who had played classical guitar in church choirs and was an accomplished folk and jazz guitarist in hometown Nuremberg, followed the man into a shop, tuned in to the sounds of the sitar and was hooked…. Neumann too was attracted by the unique development of melody in Hindustani classical. “I realized my playing lacked melody. Most of the popular music we’re exposed to has a strong beat and harmonic structure, but its melodic content is weak,” says the jazzman. He came to Shantiniketan to learn the sitar under Indranil Bhattacharya. There, the versatile artist charmed his teachers by playing the sansa, a traditional African percussion instrument. Neumann has now spent seven years in Shantiniketan and has already earned bachelors and master’s degrees in music and is planning to do a doctoral dissertation. He also runs a one-man band, Ragleela, in which he plays the sitar, acoustic guitar, bass, sansa, and the aboriginal wind instrument, didjeridoo. He has a tabla player who provides the backbeat. “But,” says he, “I will only be satisfied with my sitar playing when I am completely accepted in India.”