Ravi Shankar & Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (Bangla Dhun, New York City 1971)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYKPEQ1fRi8
What the Beatles Missed About Ravi Shankar
by TARIQ ALI
Ravi Shankar was a virtuoso sitar player long before he became a cult for a drug-fuelled hippy generation that found the exquisite music he plucked from the strings a perfect accompaniment to the consumption of marijuana and LSD. Had technology been what it is now, plugged ears would have been listening to him all the way from London to Kathmandu.
The Beatles, who flirted with Indian mysticism for a while (provoking some delicious satire from Private Eye, which called the Maharishi “Veririchi Lotsamoney Yogi Bear”), became seriously fascinated by the sitar and George Harrison took lessons in Indian classical music. The results were limited, Norwegian Wood probably ahead of the others. Not to be left behind, Brian Jones experimented with the instrument as well in Paint It Black. The fad didn’t last too long. The Beatles and Stones moved on to other things. As with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in later years, the “fusion” between west and east was only partially successful. But the positives should not be underestimated. The Beatles’ affair with Indian music helped project it to a global audience. There was rarely an empty seat at Shankar’s concerts in the United States and western Europe.
His Bengali parents had inculcated a love of music and culture while their boys were very young. Uday Shankar, the older brother, was a very fine classical dancer and choreographer. He had danced with Anna Pavlova in Paris during the 20s and he rarely compromised his art in order to please audiences unfamiliar with Kathakali and other classical Indian dances. The younger brother was the same in his own field.
“A raga,” Ravi Shankar explained to his illustrious fans in the west, “is a scientific, precise, subtle and aesthetic melodic form with its own peculiar ascending and descending movement consisting of either a full seven-note octave, or a series of six or five notes in a rising or falling structure called the Arohana and Avarohana. It is the subtle difference in the order of notes, an omission of a dissonant note, an emphasis on a particular note, the slide from one note to the other … that demarcate one raga from the other.”
The response of Harrison and Jones was not recorded, but even if they understood what he was saying it left no trace in their music or the lyrics. The raga did not dominate Sgt Pepper and as the radical music critic of the 70s Richard Merton pointed out in a startling intervention in the New Left Review of all places, the distinction of the Stones lay elsewhere. For him, Under My Thumb, Stupid Girl, Back Street Girl or Yesterday’s Papers were targeting sexual exploitation: “The enormous merit – and audacity – of the Stones is to have repeatedly and consistently defied what is a central taboo of the social system: mention of sexual inequality. They have done so in the most radical and unacceptable way possible: by celebrating it.” All that can be said on this front is that making love while listening to Under My Thumb might have been more pleasurable to some men. Women would undoubtedly have preferred the slow rising movement of the Arohana.
Counterpunch for more
The Ray-Ravi Shankar connection
by PALLAB BHATTACHARYA
Satyajit Ray (L) and Ravi Shankar (R)
Remember the music in shots from maestro Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” in which Durga and Apu run through ‘the filled with kaash’ flowers towards a speeding train? Or when mother Sarbojaya breaks down after Durga’s death? Or Durga and Apu run after the village sweet vendor?
If Ray’s was an epoch-making movie so was Pandit Ravi Shankar’s music in it. It was Shankar’s magic on the big screen.
However, Shankar came to film music much before he was roped in by Ray for “Pather Panchali” (1955) and its two sequels “Aparajito” and “Apur Sansar”.
Shankar’s music in the Apu trilogy has considerably heightened the beauty of some of the key sequences of the three films. Even before “Pather Panchali” happened, Ray was an admirer of Shankar and at times used to listen to the latter playing sitar till 2am. Shankar also composed the music in Ray’s “Debi” and “Jalsaghar”.
Even though Panditji’s first foray into cinema came in Chetan Anand’s “Neecha Nagar” (1946) during his association with Indian People’s Theatre Association movement (IPTA), he was largely ignored by Hindi cinema. It was only directors like Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar who used Shankar’s music in “Dharti Ke Lal”, “Anuradha” (1961) and“Meera” (1979) besides Chetan Anand and Abbas.
The Daily Star for more