Another day with Shri V.S. Shirali

Today, I want to share with you- my experience of a date with fabulous harmonica player Shri VS Shirali on my recent visit to Mumbai with few photos and videos I captured for the benefit of the harmonica lovers and visitors of this blog.

Needless to say, I'm a big fan of Shri Shirali and he treats me like his son. He is a very nice person with abundant knowledge of music. Apart from harmonica, he is a great keyboard and Guitar player. I adopted lot of things from him during our 8 non stop hours of discussion about music and harmonica. He says "In our generation we had the priority to be a musician first and a technician next... but these days the current generation people want to be a technician rather than being a musician. It is not a good sign".
He took me to his mentor- legendary sax player of India Late Shri Manohari Singh’s home where I conveyed my condolence to his family members as he passed away recently

I do hope you'll enjoy watching these videos. You can read more about Mr Shirali at the link given below.

http://harmonicahyderabad.blogspot.com/2010/07/vsshirali-fabulous-harmonica-player.html

A visit to Shirdi- Meeting with harmonica lover Shri Kiran Parikh

From Mumbai, I visited Shirdi for Baba’s darshan and I came in contact with Shri Kiran Parikh, a businessman from Kopargaon 10 km from Shirdi. The moment I contacted him from Shirdi, he welcomed me to his residence inspite of his busy schedule and played a good host.
Shri Kiran Parikh, a brilliant harmonica player has been playing harmonica for over 30 years. He began playing the Chinese make 'Hero' instrument. He is a great fan of Shri Bhanu Gupta, who was an assistant to legendary composer R D Burman. He also went to Mumbai to meet harmonica maestro Firoze Damri and learnt some techniques of harmonica from him. He has a good collection of various kinds of harmonicas. He also has some customized harmonicas suitable for playing some Indian ragas. I'm very fortunate to see some of the rare harmonicas in his collection. We had a great musical session for about 90 minutes in his music room which is fully equiped with Karaoke CDs. Though he plays all kinds of effects like tongue slap, Octave etc he loves to play clean single notes on a Hohner 270 harmonica. He prefers to play semi classical and rare old Hindi melodies. He says he is now going to perform about 200 stage harmonica shows in and around Maharashtra state. Even after leaving his place, he called me to know about my welfare I am very happy to meet this harmonica lover and love to meet him again at the earliest. He has also promised to visit Hyderabad to share his passion with all the Harmonica Lovers of Hyderabad.