Camden New Journal - Classical and Jazz: Clem Alford

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The Review - MUSIC - classical & jazz with TONY KIELY
Published: 9 August 2007

Clem Alford shows his mastery of the sitar

Bagpipes dropped for sitar

PREVIEW: CLEM ALFORD
Jazzlive at the Crypt

CLEM Alford, perhaps the best western sitar player in the world today, actually started his musical career playing a very different instrument.
“My father wanted me to learn the bagpipes,” he says, from his home in Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury. “He was English and had married a Scot so I think that was part of it. I liked it at first but there was a whole drinking culture with it that I just couldn’t get into.”
Moving to London aged 21 in the heady atmosphere of the mid-1960s, Clem was introduced to the sound of the sitar at a party.
“There was a lot of interest in Indian and other world music at the time,” he says.
“I heard Ali Akbar Khan’s [brother-in-law of Ravi Shankar] music at a party one time. Then I heard some Ravi Shankar and others.
“It was just a different musical culture and sound. People of my generation were into all sorts of different things and there were all these other influences out there. I was hooked on it.”
Clem’s passion took him to India where he spent two years studying under experts like Pandit Sachindranath Saha, eventually securing a diploma for expertise in sitar in 1970.
Nearly 40 years later, he has worked with everyone from John Williams to Maurice Jarre; he played the sitar on the TV drama The Jewel in the Crown, and recorded with the cult Magic Carpet band, whose albums have become collectors’ items.
Clem also teaches – he was music principal and sitar teacher at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan from 1972-76 – and is a teacher at the Birmingham Conservatoire.
Two months ago he played at Sir Paul McCartney’s private birthday party, while last Friday he was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, playing a rhapsody in tribute to Freddy Mercury, whose parents are Indian, as part of an evening devoted to Mumbai.
“I think you find your instrument in life and I was lucky enough to find mine,” he says.
“What I love about it
is that the music is
constantly rejuvenating itself.
“Western music is pre-scored but Indian classical music has an oral tradition. You learn everything from your teacher. You practise certain things for hours but every time you come to play it, it’s different.”
SUNITA RAPPAI

*Clem Alford will be at Jazzlive at The Crypt, St Giles Centre, 81 Camberwell Church Street, London, SE5 tomorrow (Friday). Tel: 020 7701 1016 Doors Open at 8pm. Music at 9.30pm

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