Raga: Mishra Gara - Gat - Taal Sitarkhani

Nikhil Banerjee performed Raga Mishra Gara as the fourth track on his 1989 album Sitar Recital. Saregama released the recording on CD. The composition follows a gat structure set to Taal Sitarkhani and spans 8 minutes and 1 second.

Banerjee opens the piece with an alaap that establishes the raga’s mixed (mishra) character, blending elements of Gara with adjacent melodic phrases. The gat section introduces rhythmic development, with intricate taans and bol-taans aligned to the 16-beat Sitarkhani cycle. The performance emphasizes the raga’s ascending and descending movements, particularly the use of komal re and teevra ma as defining swaras.

The album Sitar Recital compiles live and studio recordings from Banerjee’s later career, though specific session details for this track remain undocumented. Saregama’s CD release marked one of the first commercial distributions of Banerjee’s work in digital format, following his earlier LP and cassette publications. The label retained the original recording fidelity without remastering, preserving the acoustic resonance of the sitar and accompanying tanpura.

Notable aspects of the track include Banerjee’s use of meend (glissando) to connect phrases and his rhythmic interplay with the tabla, which remains uncredited in the album liner notes. The composition concludes with a jhala section that accelerates in tempo, showcasing the instrument’s percussive potential. The 1989 release coincided with Banerjee’s final years of active performance before his death in 1993.