Music

Ravi Shankar: Pioneer and Virtuoso

"In the course of his long career, Shankar became the world’s best-known exponent of Hindustani (North Indian classical music), performing with India’s most-distinguished percussionists and making dozens of successful recordings. Beginning in the 1960s, his concert performances with the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his association with George Harrison, lead guitarist of the then wildly popular British musical group the Beatles, helped bring Indian music to the attention of the West. Among the diverse musicians influenced by Shankar’s compositional style were the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the composer Philip Glass, with whom Shankar collaborated on the album Passages (1990). Indeed, especially remarkable among Shankar’s accomplishments is his equally expert participation in traditional Indian music and in Indian-influenced Western music. Most characteristic of the latter activity are his concerti for sitar and orchestra, particularly Raga-Mala ('Garland of Ragas'), first performed in 1981. During his lifetime he won Grammy Awards for the albums West Meets East (1966), a collaboration with Menuhin; The Concert for Bangladesh (1971), a compilation of performances by Shankar, Harrison, Bob Dylan, and others from the benefit concert Shankar inspired Harrison to organize; and Full Circle (2001), a live recording of a performance at Carnegie Hall." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Sitars in British Rock

When the most famous rock guitarists grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of them did not take guitar lessons and learned how to play by listening to records and exchanging them with their fellow guitarists (the English network of musicians in the '60s was very tight-knit, as everyone knew each other from either art school, hanging around in London, or watching shows in clubs!). Guitarists with more eclectic music taste (such as George Harrison and Jimmy Page, named below) scrounged for any records that pertained to Indian and world music, going so far as to get them from the black market record shops. In the songs linked below, the use of sitars, unusual time signatures, and Eastern scale modes demonstrate noticeable influences from the Eastern musical tradition.

Fun fact: The Beatles' song "Norwegian Wood" from their 1965 album Rubber Soul was notably one of the first Western rock songs to feature a sitar in its instrumental lineup.

Notable Influenced Albums

The military jackets and colorful, flowery display on The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album cover, and the psychedelic, warped illustrations on Cream's Disraeli Gears, are both nods to Indian culture. Ravi Shankar is one of the collaged heads on Sergeant Pepper, as he influenced The Beatles both individually and as a group. While Disraeli Gears does not contain much Indian influence in its musical compositions (it is more heavily blues-based rock, Eric Clapton's speciality), Sergeant Pepper is arguably one of the most experimental albums of all time accordingly to many music journalists and critics.