The first in an
ambitious, projected series of albums culled from the personal archives of Ravi
Shankar focuses on the two-year period when the sitar master found himself at
the center of Western counterculture. One of the tracks is actually a sequence
of cassette-recorded responses to Shankar’s music by a young American concert
audience. The mini-interviews mingle fascination with an awareness that the
classical music of India
existed in modes beyond their experience. The other tracks were recorded in India, including a 48-minute raga taped along
the banks of the sacred Ganges and another
piece recorded with the chanting of Hindu temple priests. It’s not a CD for
beginners, but rather for aficionados interested in the context of Shankar’s
music and its reception in the West during the 1960s.
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