On Charukeshi

History of Raag Charukeshi originates in the Carnatic classical music traditions of India. It's a unique scale - one that uses all Major notes in first half of the scale and only sharp / flat notes in the second half of the scale. It's what I like about the Raag, major notes can convey happy emotions and minor notes can express anguish, pain, frustration or any other emotion you're capable of conjuring as a musician.

When singing the raag, I notice shades of Bhairav and Darbari, two other raags that I'm familiar with, and I've also read that it resembles the Raag Nat.

Some of my favorite songs in Charukeshi are :

Udaya udaya by ARR
Shedding skin by Karsh Kale, Shruti Pathak, Shilpa Rao, Apeksha Dandekar and Monali Thakur. This song starts with Ustad Amir Khan's composition "laaj rakho more" before going its own way.

Here's my attempt at a mashup of some things that I love. I absolutely love John Lenon's song Imagine, and I love APC's cover of it from the Emotive album. The main structure of the song is an alternating Major minor syncopation that forms the layer on which everything else in the song is built. I loved that metaphor, but thought I could add Indian classical to the mix.

The song I'm singing is a bandish, sung originally by Smt Sawani Shinde. I learned this from hearing her songs on Youtube. I'm not sure who the composer is. Here's my version of this.

https://youtu.be/n2jL6dvYxeY