Back in Jaisalmer, I wandered the streets below the fort. At the maharajah's residential and administrative palace, a couple of German shepherds poked their heads out of ornately carved windows on the top floor. Two elders were sitting under a tree in the courtyard. I joined them. One was named Hasan Khan, and he was the alamkana, the musician of the royal family. A genial-looking man in his late fifties (my vintage), he didn't speak English, or his ears would have turned red from what his friend was telling me: "Hasan Khan is the tiger of singing. All the others are copiers. He sings songs about the maharajah, he performs the king's morning puja, his waking song, his leaving song, and his welcome song, his drinking song, and his wedding song." The Manganiyar, Hasan's friend explained, "followed the camel caravans to Iraq and Persia centuries ago and became the alamkana in the courts of the shahs and the caliphs there."
• Slideshow: Tracing the Roots of Rajasthani Music
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That night I went to the Gorbandh Palace and heard Hasan Khan perform; he was sitting on a carpet on the rooftop restaurant with two of his sons backing him up, while a full moon came up over the fort. It was a scene that I imagine has not changed much in a thousand years. The following morning I went down to Hasan Khan's house and listened to a bhairav, a morning raga that had many exquisite melodic variations. He played me one of his own compositions, which I would have guessed was a good-time northeast Brazilian accordion dance tune had I not been where I was -- hearing it live from the harmonium of the alamkana of Jaisalmer.
To my ears, there was certainly evidence to support the hypothesis that Gypsies have been principal transmitters of common melodic patterns in Eurasia and the European cultures of the Americas. But then again, a lot of the melodies I heard had no connection to Gypsy music at all. That's not surprising, since the octave and the five-note pentatonic scale, based on the cycle of fifths, are considered universal. They are the way the human ear organizes melodic sound in every culture. There is eighth-century Taoist zither meditation music that sounds like Delta blues, with the same pentatonic runs minus their emotional weight, and the Incas had pentatonic panpipes. Neither of these had anything to do with the Gypsy diaspora.
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Music is the most elusive form of human expression, and its transmission is never a one-way street. The kamaica that the Manganiyar were playing here, for instance, probably originated in Persia. Modern Malian music is influenced by American blues. Cuban rumba affected Zairean music and was in turn affected by it. (Zaire is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.) All this crossing and back-crossing really muddies the waters, so it is almost impossible to establish what came from where. You cannot say this is where it all began, any more than you can say this is where the first drums were beaten. As I listened, I eventually stopped imposing what I was looking for and began to enjoy the music for what it was: beautiful, alive, and present.
Alex Shoumatoff is a T+L contributing editor.
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• Slideshow: Tracing the Roots of Rajasthani Music
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