Biography
Among the ranks of the world’s foremost instrumentalists, a distinct place belongs to those who introduce technical advances in the very design and construction of their instruments, and India’s Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman had already earned a formidable reputation before embarking on such research. Perhaps the inclination ran in the family: his father, Dr. P. Kasiviswanatha, combined the practice of medicine with distinguished musicianship. The son matched and extended that breadth by becoming both a leading accompanist on the mridangam and a qualified lawyer while earning dual degrees from the University of Madras. He gave his debut concert at the age of ten inside a temple and was still performing five decades later, most often supporting the era’s superstar vocalists and instrumentalists of Indian classical music. Among the many artists he accompanied or recorded with are Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Musiri Subramania Iyer, Palladam Sanjeeva Rao, Mysore Chowdiah, Rajamanickam Pillai, Papa Venkataramiah, Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu, Mudikondan Venkatarama Iyer, G. N. Balasubramaniam, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ustad Allah Rakha, and Zakhir Hussain. Outside the classical sphere he joined violinist L. Shankar for an ECM session that fused contemporary new-age jazz with pronounced Indian elements. Throughout a schedule of constant demand he nevertheless pursued exhaustive study of every facet of the mridangam, becoming a pioneer in organizing workshops and other instructional programs devoted to the instrument. He also produced working prototypes of a fibre-glass mridangam and carried out systematic experiments on both tanned and untanned drum skins, devising a mechanical jig that standardized the moulding of the side-head skin previously shaped entirely by hand and therefore prone to inconsistency. Further investigations into the composition of the central “black patch” yielded greater knowledge and finer regulation of the instrument’s overtones. His frequent broadcasts established him as a premier artist for All India Radio and Doordarshan Television. In the early 1990s he assumed the directorship of the Tanjore Vaidyanatha Iyer School for Percussion at the Madras Music Academy, an institution founded to honor a celebrated lineage of mridangam players, several of whom had taught him. During the 1980s and 1990s he received numerous honorary titles and awards, among them the Padmashri conferred by the Government of India in 1988 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for mridangam in 1992. Teaching, increasingly to foreign students, remained a central pursuit. In 1996 he issued the album Garland of Rhythm on the Magnasound label, and selections of his playing appeared on two anthologies curated by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart for Ellipsis Arts, where he stood alongside an international roster of percussion masters. He is sometimes listed as U.K. Sivaraman.
Albums
