Images: Baila Music from Sri Lanka: The Gypsies

The Gypsies, a pop band from Sri Lanka, performs at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in conjunction with the exhibition Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The band’s specialty is baila, a genre of Sri Lankan popular music with roots among seventeenth-century Portuguese fishermen and African slaves during the colonial period.

Vocalist Sunil Perera leads the Gypsies, a pop band from Sri Lanka, in a concert of baila music at the Freer Gallery of Art on July 12, 2007. The most popular form of baila today was pioneered in the 1940s by singer and composer Wally Bastiansz, whose songs can be heard on tracks 2, 4, and 9 of this recording. Baila music in a wide range of styles is now heard across the island and in Sri Lankan communities around the world.

Participants in a workshop at the Sackler Gallery demonstrate baila dance moves for the audience. In Sri Lanka and among Sri Lankans abroad, baila music is popular at weddings, concerts, nightclubs, and parties of all kinds. At Sri Lankan dance clubs, baila often replaces Western pop music toward the end of the night, bringing everyone back to the floor for a grand finale.

Members of the Gypsies, a pop band from Sri Lanka, lead a workshop on baila music at the Sackler Gallery. These workshops focused on the older repertoire of baila songs whose lyrics reflect the Portuguese influence dating to the seventeenth century. These songs tell of the lives and loves of fishermen along the coast, where Portuguese colonies once existed. The song “Surangani” (track 14 of this podcast) describes a poor fisherman who tries to woo a distraught young woman with the offer of fresh fish. Seated front row, from left, are Hemapal Perera, Anne Sheeran, and lead singer Sunil Perera.

Workshops on Sri Lankan baila music at the Freer and Sackler Galleries featured guest artist Hemapal Perera (left) on mandolin and banjo, lead singer Sunil Perera (right center), and ethnomusicologist Anne Sheeran (right top). An accomplished artist in north Indian (Hindustani) classical music, Hemapal Perera also specializes in some of the earliest baila songs, said to be based on seventeen or eighteen melodies of Portuguese origin. He can be heard playing the mandolin on track 14 of the podcast, the traditional song “Surangani.”