Ceylon Tea and the Rhythm of the Drum, with Ravibandu

This transcript was created automatically from the audio and checked for names. Minor errors may remain.

Welcome to Tea Inspiration. Tea is fantastic on its own. It's an expression of nature. Tea with food, incredible. It dignifies food. Tea with beverage, fantastic. I have tried some of the most amazing tea cocktails you would not believe, but that's for another day. But today, we're gonna talk about tea with music and specifically with percussion. The drums are an echo of the human heartbeat. And so in a sense, drums and the art of percussion, it's a window to the soul. Tea is an expression of nature. We are a part of the biological diversity in nature. And so today we are going to explore two different aspects of nature with the experience of tea from the sense of hearing and connecting that with pairing it beautifully with tea in terms of its flavor, its taste, its aroma and its fragrance.

And I have someone very special who's gonna do that with us. It is the multi-generational artist, Ravibandu. Ravi is a maestro in Sri Lankan traditional drums, but he's gonna tell you a little bit more about it himself. Drumming is the art of expressing rhythm. Rhythm that we fathom, rhythm that we grasp from all over, from the universe, from the nature, and also the rhythm that is born within ourselves. And that too, based on the heartbeat, laptop, laptop, laptop, laptop, laptop, laptop, laptop, laptop.

Isn't it a really amazing thing? Well, talking a little bit about myself, I'm coming from a traditional family of dancers, tempo fainters and drummers for over eight generations now. So drumming is really in my blood and I really can't wait without playing. It need not be a drum, a proper drum, but any surface, even on my cheeks.

Impressive, but what are you doing with this pot? Are you going to cook for us, Ravi, or are you going to drum? I'm interested to know what it's doing here, this pot. Well, a pot can contain water, the life giver, or it can contain wine, and it can contain rhythm. Look at this. This is a traditional instrument from South India called ghatam, which means pot. And it's made out of red clay mixed with copper and brass dust and stone dust. This is a special art, actually, the making of the drum. And there are traditional families in South India who make these musical pots. But as I told you before, it contains rhythm.

Fantastic, Ravi. So today we are going to see how we can translate that rhythm into a pleasurable experience. You know, today I think for us, we love what we do, right, I think passion is the love that we have for our art. I love tea, I love the influence of nature on tea. I love the fact that tea is so infinite in its variety. And we've seen your love. We've experienced it and we have heard it. So in combining the two, we're going to start with the tea that you told me is your favorite. It's an Earl Grey tea. So you have here, you have here a tea that has its foundation in a low elevation tea.

It is from the region around Ratnapura where we have our Kahawata tea gardens. You have intensity there, you have the sunshine that is producing strength and character in the tea, giving it much more depth than the lightness and the brightness that you see here at Dunkield at 4,000 feet above sea level. And that is combined in a tradition that goes back to the 1800s with citrus, with the bergamot, with oil of bergamot, which is a fruit, it's from the citrus orange family. And it gives it that sweetness, it gives it a fruity character and it gives it the pleasant, slightly pungent orange with a little bit of bitterness, but a very pleasant bitterness.

So this bergamot is in a sense, a more complex, less sweet version of what we know as an orange. Not our Sri Lankan orange, but what we know as a typical orange in terms of its sweetness and balance. So let's see what you're gonna do with this. Well, as Urgree is one of my favorite teas, I'm going to combine it with my favorite drum, the traditional Gattabere or the Candian Drum. As you see, it just pointed out, Urgree tea has, you know, like different tastes or different flavors. Different notes? Different notes, exactly. So let's try to combine it with the different notes of the Candian Drum that gives the soft aspects as well as the, not really the hard, but more powerful aspect.

Beautiful Ravi. I can almost hear the Earl of Grey's footsteps as he comes here and joins us in this harmonious interaction of tea and your beautiful art. So now we're going to move on to another English tradition, but actually not a lot English about it. This is a beautiful Ceylon tea, Sri Lankan tea. It's called Ceylon tea because people knew Sri Lankan tea as Ceylon from the time it was called Ceylon. And the name persists simply because of people's familiarity. Typically, this tea is bright and strong. It needs to be strong because at four o'clock in the morning, when the Scottish planters back then, the pioneer planters, when they woke up and came to muster on these hills, they were cold.

They were sometimes wet. As we were this morning, we experienced exactly what was required, what they did. And then they wanted something warm, strong to really wake them up and to also help them through the day. At that time, you know, they had to battle leopard. We have leopard up on the ridge here, but at that time there were many more. There were elephant, you know, there were many elephant until Thomas Farr destroyed many of them, but there were so many wild animals. So many challengers, they had to fight malaria and so many things. So they needed intensity and strength. And that we provide to this day, uncompromising the same formula.

And it is brightness, strength, woodiness.

You know, a good Ceylon tea has the balance of the light, bright, almost citrus. It's almost lemony, but also it has the depth. It is a rounded character that is neither light and bright, nor strong and intense, but bridges it. And you have some texture. You have what we call the gut. So that comes from the polyphenols in the tea, the antioxidants, the goodness in the tea, and it coats the tongue. So that is a good Ceylon tea, a good breakfast tea. And that's what this is. So that's your challenge. Translate that and express it in percussion. Well, you said that people in the past, they needed some kind of strong stimulation with a pick me up kind of feeling.

So that connects me to this drum, which is Thammat Tama, that is played early morning in the temple. And to that sound, the people woke up. So the rhythm is also uncompromising because the drummer had to learn all the rhythms, know it by heart, and never could he, you know, mix it with any other patterns or improvisations, but he had to play that fixed pattern every morning. So let's try and match this quality of the Thammat Tama and also the balance of the playing between the two faces.

It continues like that, but then I played part of it. Ravi, I'm glad that you weren't around in the 1800s because if you were, we might not have had this tea. We might not have had English breakfast because the planters would have woken up. You would have played the Thammat Tama and I would have been out of a job 150 years later. But beautiful, a perfect expression of the two, the brightness, the vitality, the life force coming up and really expressing itself, which is what this tea does, which is exactly what your rhythm did. So now we are coming a little bit lower, a little bit away from the Dimbula Valley.

We are coming lower in the elevation of Sri Lanka. We are coming somewhere between Dimbula, between Hatton and Ratnapura. And now this tea, our premium Ceylon single origin, it's an expression of the soul of Ceylon tea. It is balanced, it has richness, medium intensity. So it is what you would call a tea that is generally accepted to a person who enjoys tea. It's an all day drinking tea. So it is neither light nor bright. Well, of course it has some brightness, but it is neither on this side of the spectrum nor on this side. So it is somewhere in between offering an assortment of different characters that makes it a pleasing all day drinking tea.

You can have it in the morning, you can have it in the afternoon, you can have it in the evening, you can have it at night. And it has a beautiful character. It is really the soul of Sri Lanka to me. Well, that connects me to this particular drum, which I myself developed from the traditional basis.

In our traditional literature, we have a kind of drum called Kalabhera or Kumbhabheri or Kalabhera, pot drums. So I wanted to develop this drum to give a kind of a, not really serene, but a kind of a neutral tone that is not harsh to the ear, nor it is light like this. Perfectly expressed Ravi, perfect. The soul of Sri Lanka and that's a beautiful pairing. This is, I mean, since it is my own development, I wouldn't say creation because it's something that I developed from the traditional drums. So I feel very close to it. It's perhaps my soul. It has a unique sound. It has a unique sound, thank you.

And it's my soul. Wonderful, wonderful. What better? So we should retain this, the soul of Ravi. Great. One day. Thank you, I'm annoyed. So we started in the Dibula Valley. We headed down towards Swatapura and now we go a little bit further down in the Ruhunu region. And where we are ending up is a tea that has intensity, that has a little bit of a multi earthy note. What we know as a low country tea from a states like Nilagamara, like this kind, near Gaul and so on. So you have here heat, you have humidity, you have sandy soils producing this strength, producing this intensity.

It's what we call our extra strength tea and it has it. So for people who drink tea with milk, I don't, so I take it like this. This is a tea that gives them balance. So it has strength. It has earthiness, it has maltiness. Those are the notes. And I know that you have something for this. Well, exactly, yes. The low country drum with low country tea. Perfect. This is the drum that represents the entire low country dance culture. And I say low country, it's the southern lowlands of Sri Lanka, mainly. And the playing is also very intense in this. That kind of playing with some muted sounds also has this kind of very earthy feeling.

It's very well grounded. It exactly perfectly matches what we have here. Now, you told me earlier, Avita, this drum is something a little bit unique that it also is made from the intestine of the cow. Yes, exactly. This is a rare thing. I haven't heard of any other musical instrument in the world that uses the intestine of the cow. Fantastic. And you know, it's these stories and it's this truth that gives color to the passion that you and I have and helps us to share this with people who are watching, who hopefully this knowledge inspires them to passion. Thank you, Ravi. Yeah, thank you. That's a beautiful synergy.

It's wonderful. Indeed. Thank you so much.