PORT ANGELES — When Joseph Ravi Albright and Deepak Ram give a concert this Friday night, it will be a reunion of men pulled — by music and an unnameable magic — down a winding road.
Albright and Ram first met 13 years ago, when Albright was a teenager from Port Angeles who played the tabla, drums that originated in south Asia.
Both had already traveled a considerable distance before crossing paths.
One snowy night when Albright was 13, he was riding in the family car, traveling from Port Townsend to Port Angeles, when his father, Matt Albright, pulled over beside another car that had slid off the highway.
“To make a long story short, I was hit by a van going 50 miles per hour on an icy road,” Albright said in an interview last week.
“My leg was fractured in multiple places; five surgeries later, I had been out of school for a full year.”
While convalescing, Albright took up the guitar. But he felt more drawn to the tabla, an instrument he knew well from the Indian music his father played as he was growing up.
Studied in India
Matt Albright encouraged his son to study music, and even to go to India. His mother, Ellen Adams, a nurse at Olympic Medical Center, agreed.
India is the place, of course, where the masters of the classical music — who begin playing at age 4 or 5 — teach their ancient knowledge.
Young Albright spent three months in India, and then continued his studies at Mount Madonna, a residential learning center near Watsonville, Calif.
Ram, an Indian bansuri flutist who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, was also at Mount Madonna. He noticed the teenager and, sensing his dedication, began working with him.
“I think Deepak saw that I was in love with tabla,” Albright recalled, “and knew that I would be willing to put in the 10,000 hours that it would take to really play this instrument.”
“He works really hard,” Ram agreed.
Ram mentored Albright
Ram became Albright’s teacher, a twist of fate that connected the youth, by extension, with another Indian flutist: the renowned maestro Pandit Hariprasad Charausia. His music was often on the Albright household stereo back in Port Angeles.
It was Ram who inspired Albright to pursue the tabla, difficult as it was, and to make it his profession.
As founding director of the Anindo Chatterjee Institute of Tabla in Seattle, Albright now performs and teaches full time.
Ram, who lives in Washington, D.C., travels the world playing the bansuri and came once before to Port Angeles and Port Townsend in 2009.
Though his parents are Indian, he grew up in a house where Miles Davis and John Coltrane supplied the soundtrack; Ram’s brothers liked the jazz, along with some Led Zeppelin.
‘Born again’
Home alone one day, he found some other records, and put them on.
“I discovered Indian classical music,” Ram said. “I felt like I was born again.”
Today Ram is a composer as well as a touring performer who lives and breathes traditional Indian music, which he says is about as old as humankind.
It is also, he takes care to say, a fluid art form made ever new by improvisation. Ram loves to explore its boundaries, and even calls his flute playing a kind of yoga, a union of body and soul.
Albright, for his part, is feeling gratitude for the way both Ram and his father believed in him.
Matt Albright died of cancer in 2007, leaving behind his sons Ravi and Abe and daughters Margaret, Annie and Elizabeth.
Olympic National Park’s nursery manager for 19 years, he is the namesake of the park’s Matt Albright Native Plant Center, where plants are being raised for the Elwha River restoration.
Matt was also an accomplished violinist, his son said. And “without his support, I wouldn’t have gone to India or started studying tabla of all instruments.
“Without my father’s love for the music, it never would have happened. I can hardly express how I wish he was here to see what I’m doing now.”
Flute, tabla
This Friday, Albright and Ram hope to uplift their audience with the sound of flute and tabla.
“I would invite people to take some time off from whatever thoughts and tasks are on their minds, and come to listen. It’s a really peaceful, beautiful and serene type of music,” Albright said.
The listeners, he added, are key to the experience.
This form of Indian music is 75 percent improvisation, and the players can sense whether they’re connecting with their audience.
“If you are smiling, it inspires the musicians to play with more heart,” Albright said.
If nobody responds, “it’s like if you are at a birthday party by yourself. If there is no one to share the joy with, then you can’t have any fun.”
As it turns out, Friday is Albright’s 28th birthday.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
