In Brooklyn, you're a Kutumba, too

It was a Thursday evening, and about forty people had gathered at the MIMA studio, an old ex-textile warehouse where Kutumba was opening up their music, revealing the marrow of their folk sounds.



The event was organized by MIMA, an international non-profit that builds communities through improvisational music education.[break] I was seated on the wooden floor, with other Nepalis and non-Nepalis, most of us brought together through word of mouth. But we weren’t your typical audience: singer Raju Lama had just joined us, and our side of the floor was littered with banjos, ukuleles, guitars, a violin, a mandolin, a flute, and a trombone.



We weren’t there for a show. We were there for an interaction. The lights weren’t dimmed, the stage wasn’t elevated and there were no physical barriers between the performers and the audience. We were there to (re)acquaint ourselves to Nepali folk music through the “MIMA method” of inspiration, transformation, creation and celebration.



Before each song, Pavit Dai, percussionist and a vital force of the band, made sure to introduce the instruments, the tile of the song, and its origin. They played three songs for inspiration. Some of us were listening to it for the first time while some of us were amazed at the songs’ constant newness.



Either way, we had taken a journey with the Kutumba musicians: We released ourselves with each drumbeat; we slowed down as the sarangi meandered in beautiful wails; we wandered through the mountains with the tungna; and we held our heartbeats for the ghunguru.



Then, as an audience, we were asked to transform the music. We had to try to imitate the sound of each instrument –but with our bodies. There were giggles, some gasps.

Pavit Dai beat the “chandi” on his drums. We tried to recreate it. Thighs, chest, palms, legs, floor, heads, we used them all. We did this as a group and tried to follow Pavit Dai’s beat until he stopped and we continued.







Then Swastika Shrestha of Sarvodaya, who is touring with Kutumba, taught us a dance step that could go with the beat. She created this for us and we made a circle, counting our steps, jumping, holding onto our partners by their waists.



Then came the final part, the celebration where we brought all of this together as Kutumba played the entire song.



Of course, nobody wanted to leave. People walked up to the instruments and wanted to touch them, strum them, and blow into them. We had just created music together and had somehow become a part of Kutumba.



My friend Caleb Dance, a flautist and a MIMA instructor, leaned in and whispered, “I’m going to ask Rubin if I can play one of his flutes.”



And just that impulse started a long jam session between Kutumba and the audience members. Brooklyn had tuned in to the rhythms of Nepali folk music spiced with jazz and bluegrass, and it didn’t matter if the trombone went along with the sarangi, or if half the people were unfamiliar with the words to “Resham Firiri.” In that space, we, as a community, had learnt to listen to one another and communicate in a language we had created together.



Later that evening, I sat down to a meal of daal-bhaat with Kutumba at a Nepali restaurant where Phiroj Shyangden from 1974 AD was performing live. I asked the Kutumba if they were at the 2002 Birendra International Convention Centre show, to which Pavit Dai said, “I think everybody was there.”



He was right. 1974 AD had connected our generation of Nepalis and somehow we were all there. I asked him what he thought about the event in Brooklyn, and he said, “Although I was confused at first, it was so inspiring to create music with our bodies and voices alone and build a community just through that. No instruments needed. It’s an innovative way to think, and Kutumba aren’t only about playing big concerts.”



Although all of Kutumba’s alleged 53,000 Facebook fans were not physically in that intimate space in Brooklyn, everybody was there. Phiroj Dai and his songs once inspired Kutumba, and to see them shake his hand and ask for his autograph under a New York sky is a promise of transference of art and the creation of community, away from home, beyond language, beyond the stage, beyond the microphone.



(The writer is currently an MFA candidate in fiction and an Undergraduate Writing Program instructor at Columbia University. She helped organize this event for MIMA and Kutumba. More info can be found at mimamusic.org.)

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