Indian Ocean concert - Washington DC Metro Area

The Association for India's Development (AID), a non-profit, organized an Indian Ocean concert. For all those folks who don't know what Indian Ocean band is - it's  a band which started about 18 years ago and attempts to mix Indian classical music with western Jazz.... apparently (which I discovered yesterday) they started off as an intrumental only band and later advanced into vocal...

I hadn't heard a whole lot of IO music (don't be surprised with that considering they have done only some 30 or so songs over their 18 years history), except for a few like Kandisa, Maa Rewa etc... Yesterday they started off with one of their numbers "Kya Maloom" which was apparently composed during the height of the Kargil war between India and Pakistan.... One good thing about the band was that the guys are very ultra cool and chill types (thanks to their western education! one of the guys has a Phd in environmental toxicology from cornell). Before the start of any song, they would give a brief introduction of what it is about and that used to be really funny; I think the audience laughed more at the introductions than at any other time in the concert... the concert proceeded with more of their well known numbers like Kandisa, Maa Rewa, Hille Re, Bhor and several others.... after about an hour or so we took a short 10-15 min break and resumed after which they played for another 1.5-2 hours..... In some of the songs (like Maa Rewa) they tried to mix a lot of Jazz like instrumental music which I don't think is actually there in the original music itself. Sometimes it fell like an overkill- the music itself is so good that it didn't really need any more fusion... but anyways....

If I have to say on a scale of 1-10 how I found the concert, I would say 7... why not more than that? hmmm, there were a few things about the organization of the entire concert which really bothered me, not to mention the fact that it started almost an hour after it was scheduled to start due to "technical difficulties". For one, it didn't seem like the audience itself was thought about in the entire organization.... there were no signs about which line is the food line and which is the ticket or the food coupon line.... people were just supposed to know that by intuition..... the IO CDs did not have a listing of the songs on their back; how is the audience supposed to know what they are buying if they don't know the songs? The other thing which really bothered me was the "run for India" presentation they made.... it was the most poorly made presentation I have ever seen... for  someone who had not seen the run, it was almost impossible to find out what it was.... there was no connection made to the fact that it was done as part of the Marine Corps Marathon.. and of course when the run is actually conducted wouldn't be known had the IO guys not mentioned it to the audience.... there were no names mentioned for the runners in any of the slides and no captions whatsoever..... on some levels it felt like an insult for all those volunteers who had spent so much time and effort on the run....

Anyways, for everything there was, I think it was a fun concert...... AID did a good job raising money for all those poor, hapless people who lost their everything in Bihar floods.......