Tabla
Manjit Singh
Manjit Singh is a tabla player in the Hindustani classical tradition. The tabla, a pair of hand drums, holds the rhythmic cycle of a performance and answers the melody in a conversation of its own.
Living Painting
Darbar
by Manjit Singh & Jaita Singh
Music fromIndia
An improvised duet for tabla and sarod, set inside 17th-century Mughal paintings.
Best with headphones
A darbar was a royal court, where music and dance were performed before kings and nobility. For centuries, these courts were where India’s classical arts found their patrons.
Manjit Singh (tabla) and Jaita Singh (sarod) improvise a Hindustani jugalbandi, a duet in 17th-century style. It begins slow and contemplative, and builds in energy as it goes.
The set is built from 17th-century Mughal paintings in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including the Portrait of Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne and the Rosette Bearing the Names and Titles of Shah Jahan.
Credits
- Tabla
- Manjit Singh
- Sarod
- Jaita Singh
- Digital art
- Jonathan Hislop
Sarod
Jaita Singh
Jaita Singh plays the sarod, a fretless, deep-voiced lute of Hindustani classical music, prized for its gliding, singing notes.
Digital art
Jonathan Hislop
Jonathan Hislop is a digital artist based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the founder of Sounds of a Sphere. Jonathan films traditional musicians and dancers, then sets them inside worlds built from the visual heritage of their own cultures: temple carvings, miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts.
Each world is built by hand in Unreal Engine, Nuke, After Effects and Photoshop. No generative AI is used at any stage. Musicians and cultural advisors guide how their tradition is represented.
These Living Paintings have filled a room at the BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival three years running, opened the Māoriland Film Festival, screened at international film festivals and been shared by New Zealand embassies around the world.
