10 years ago, eighteen-year-old Stefan Cihelka guided the stylus of his stereo
turntable onto one of his dad's old Ravi Shankar record albums and the course
of his life changed forever. Although the recording featured the sitar, it was
the tablas which riveted Cihelka. "Instantly a light went on," he
says.
For the next year Cihelka became obsessed with the sounds, rhythms
and mathematics of the tabla. It took him a few months to find
a set of used tablas and a teacher, Satwant Singh, who had been
a member of a Vancouver rock band, the Poppy Family, in the sixties.
Singh was a talented player in his own right and, most importantly
for Cihelka, he was a student of the legendary Ustad Alla Rakha
who had played tabla on the old Ravi Shankar recordings.
Tabla music became known in the West during the sixties when Ravi Shankar rose
to international fame. They are the drums used in Indian music and often accompany
vocals and other instruments such as sitar, veena or sarod. Cihelka explains,
"Ninety-five percent of tabla is improvised and five percent is structured.
You have a raga, a scale and a time cycle and the rest is up to the creativity
of the musician. Much of the practice is repetitive, and sometimes you play
the same line overand over for hours."
Cihelka has chosen an unusual path in becoming a tabla player, considering
he has spent much of his life in middle-class, suburban Vancouver. He wears
a kurta pajama. He is slightly built with red hair and beard. He has
about him the intense air of a young ascetic. He spends much of his time in
a room full of tablas.
At age nineteen Cihelka got on an airplane bound for Bombay
determined to study tabla with Ustad Alla Rakha. He had not called
ahead but had an address where he hoped to find the tabla maestro.
He landed in Bombay in the middle of the night and the next day
nervously went to call on Rakha.
He knocked on the door and wondered how he would be received. Cihelka says,
"Looking back, I wonder how I managed to do it. I think there was some
destiny involved and I had a very strong feeling that it was the right thing
to do. I had spent all my money on a plane ticket to India. I wasn't even sure
Ustad Alla Rakha was alive."
Rakha looked at him a little oddly as Cihelka introduced himself and the purpose
of his visit. He motioned Cihelka to wait while he disappeared for a few minutes
and returned to take the young man to his first lesson. "One of the reasons
he probably took me on as a student was because I was crazy enough to show up
at his door and introduce myself: 'Hi, I'm from Vancouver.'"
