Roots Music Report

Composed by scalloped fretboard guitar innovator Matthew Montfort, Yearning for the Wind is a poignant piece based on Indian raga. Set in a nine beat rhythmic cycle, it provides a sublime setting for this duet with Indian tabla virtuoso Vishal Nagar, who is considered one of the most gifted tabla players of his generation.

Recorded in December 2013, this evocative piece was produced for the Archive of Future Ancient Recordings, Ancient Future's ambitious ongoing recording project. To finance A.F.A.R., Ancient-Future.Com Records provides financial supporters access to select files from Ancient Future's archives of alternate takes, live concerts, radio performances and new studio recordings as they are created. On February 11, 2014, the exact 35th anniversary of the first Ancient Future concert, Yearning for the Wind became the 10th track added to the archive and was made available to A.F.A.R. supporters in mp3, CD quality, and 96-kHz/24-bit hi-res audio and HD video.

To promote the Archive of Future Ancient Recordings, fans can order Yearning for the Wind on iTunes as an mp3 bundled with an HD video (AF-20302), as an enhanced audio/video E-CD at online record stores starting 7/22/2014, or sign up to support A.F.A.R.to get it in full 96-kHz/24-bit audio resolution as a thank-you gift!

Within a week of its digital preview release, Yearning for the Wind rose to the top of the Ethnocloud World Music Charts, earning #1 spots in both the video and audio track categories, and propelling Ancient Future to the #1 rated artist spot in June, 2014.

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Raga and Tala

A raga is a melodic recipe for a mood. In Hindustani music, each raga has certain moods associated with it, and usually has a specific time of day it is meant to be played. Raga could be described as a "super scale" using a set of notes in ascending (arohi) and descending (avarohi) order, sometimes including prescribed alternate routes, a hierarchy of note importance, and a key phrase that shows the heart of the movement of the raga. This ancient system is both an art and a science of how musical notes create certain moods. The recipe for each raga holds the key to an unlimited number of potential melodies, each perpetuating the mood contained in the raga.

Yearning for the Wind is based on Rag Kalyan, an evening raga that employs the same scale as the Lydian mode. It also incorporates harmony and other guitaristic elements. It starts with an alap, an introductory melodic improvisation that shows how the raga moves.

Once the alap comes to a conclusion, the slow gat, or main theme, is introduced in the tala, or rhythmic cycle, in this case matta tal, a nine beat cycle (divided 4, 2, 3). Each tala has a theka, which is a standard groove represented by onomatopoeic drum syllables and played as an accompaniment:

+                                           o                     2 
dhin       terikita   dhin       na         tin        na         dhin  dhin na   dhin  dhin na
1          2          3          4          5          6          7          8          9

The last three beats are subdivided into two sets of one and a half beats. As a bridge between the slow and fast sections of the piece, Vishal Nagar performs an elegant tabla solo over the soft nine beat groove that slowly builds up to a vibrant rela (a fast tabla composition characterized by rapid drum rolls).