T M Krishna @ IIMB

Thanks to a friend @ IIMB, went to Carnatic kutcheri after long time.

Went to the venue a few minutes ahead of TM Krishna's kutcheri, so got the chance to see Mishra brothers in action(of course not for long).
Earlier I had been to T M Krishna's homepage and so got interested in seeing him concert. Actually, never listened to him earlier via tapes/mp3. So went there to the OAT venue with interest.

Both me and TM Krishna were introduced to a major hitch in 'microphone'.
The microphone system was off-the-mark and so the concert started maybe 30 minutes late from the scheduled time. But that was not all, soon TM Krishna and his co-artists started complaining about the microphone system. According to them, there seems to be some humming sound which kept coming up, when he was singing. TM Krishna's and his co-artists' irritation was for all to see. After the initial song 'Vatapi Ganapathim..', TM Krishna said 'I cant continue like this' and said it is difficult for him to sing. He soon requested all the audience to come front near the dias and said he will sing without microphone.

Thought it was a wonderful decision by TM Krishna, cause I was also sensing that the sound system was quite dismal. There seems to be too much of feedback(same as the ones we hear in old-style rock concerts), resonance and sometimes strange 'dub ... dub...'. I think there were too many microphones close to each other and that probably might be the reason. The microphone-man came close to Krishna and asked Krishna what the problem was. TM Krishna slightly rudely responded, 'I am not the technical person here, you should be telling me 'what the problem is!''. That made up a rather sorry viewing, imagine losing your cool infront of your fans. That was not the end for this rather sorry episode, soon the compere requested TM Krishna with folded hands to continue singing with the existing sound system. Thought maybe this compere need not have embarassed TM Krishna by requesting this. Poor man TM Krishna must have felt terribly sorry for no fault of his and went to on to sing with the rather stupid system. It was more like a Led Zeppelin/Pink Floyd concert, with feedback thrown in now-and-then :-( ( of course unintentionally by the artist)

For a moment, I was wondering how is this microphone supposed to be that important and soon thought about those Pink floyd's rock-concert videos. Pink Floyd was one of the techno-savy bands of their time and they were good musicians alongwith good sound engineers. They trusted no third party sound system or equipment, so they always carried their our gadgets for whatever concert they went whether it is in UK or outside UK.

Concert was okay, considering all the sound-hitches. Was expecting him to sing some Bharathiyar song or maybe any Tamil song, guess, he did not sing any tamil song.