Date: June 1970
Release: Douglas Music #ADC 10
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Surprisingly, this acoustic album was recorded at the exact moment when John McLaughlin was a key player in Miles Davis’ rock-influenced electric jazz revolution. While McLaughlin plays unplugged here, none of his characteristic intensity is lost, as is apparent on the side-long pair of Indo-jazz fusions, “Peace One” and “Peace Two.” Infused with the entrancing throb and drone of Badal Roy’s tabla and Mahalakshmi’s tamboura, these two tracks meld the rhythms of India with the virtuosity of McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar leads, creating deeply moving music of startling originality. Joined by fellow Miles Davis’ veterans Dave Liebman, Billy Cobham, and Airto Moreira, McLaughlin consistently demonstrates his abilities as both a player and a leader throughout the album’s five original cuts, particularly on the fiery “Phillip Lane.”

His cover of Charles Mingus’ “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat” is delicate and beautiful. A memorable recording of atmospheric music of the highest order.

Date: July 4 and November 8, 1970
Release: IMPULSE #228
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A mystical excursion into the realm of jazz-infused Eastern music by the widow and the disciple of the stellar John Coltrane. Spiritual and atmospheric sounds flow out of the harp and the piano of Alice Coltrane and the soprano saxophone of . The title track opens the album with dreamy intensity, establishing the vibe that pervades the entire recording. Cecil McBee’s bass is prominent, flowing hypnotically throughout, and his solo on “Something About John Coltrane” is breathtaking. Pharoah plays majestically and with great dedication, making this one of his most passionate post-John Coltrane outings. Alice divides her time evenly between the harp and the piano. She demonstrates her unconventional virtuosity on piano with the 9 1/2 minute “Something About John Coltrane,” putting a distinct avant-garde twist on the blues. On harp she reveals an imaginative ability to explore Eastern sounds on an instrument largely associated with Western classical music.

Check out the title track for enlightenment. Rashied Ali’s drums swirl freely around McBee’s bass lines, intertwining with Coltrane’s unearthly runs on the harp to create magical sheets of shimmering sounds. The album’s single live track, “Isis and Osiris,” features some stunning references to the music of John Coltrane played by Vishnu Wood on the oud. This recording represents one of the most original efforts to fuse the improvisations of jazz to the entrancing rhythms of the East. Sit down, light some incense, put on this album, and assume the Lotus position.

Date: September 3-4, 1966 (recording)
Release: Atlantic #SD 1482
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“The purpose of art is mystery.”

—René Magritte

Not even relegated to the shadowy status of cult figure, Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott remains virtually unknown today. A key influence in the British free-jazz movement of the early ’60s, Harriott’s adventurous style earned him unfavorable comparisons with Ornette Coleman, even though he was far more boppishly swinging than his volatile American counterpart ever was. An unsung pioneer in the union of Eastern and Western music, Harriott began experimenting with Indian musical forms in the mid ’60s, incorporating its distinctive structures and rhythmic patterns into a jazz framework.

Harriott soon merged his working quintet with a five-piece Indian ensemble headed up by Calcutta composer, conductor, and violin master (he played in the London Philharmonic) John Mayer, co-leading this Indo-jazz “double quintet” until his untimely death in 1973. While the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet certainly did not invent the mixing of jazz andIndian music (Ravi Shankar and Bud Shank were doing it in 1961), they were the very first group to use the term “fusion” in identifying their sound (don’t blame them…they only gave the genre its F-word name, not its derogatory connotation). Artists of the highest order, they were able to fully evoke the mystery of the East within a solid jazz context, a feat few contemporary jazz and world musicians have matched.

Released in 1967, Indo-Jazz Fusions boldly meshed elements of Western and Indian classical music with modal and free-jazz to create a vibrant and organic new sound. The album opens with the 17-minute Mayer composition, “Partita,” a highly orchestrated suite comprised of three linked movements, featuring strong individual solos and an intense collective improvisation at its end. Mayer nimbly conducts both halves of the Double Quintet as they riff on traditional Indian scales (ragas) and lay down intricate rhythmic patterns (talas). Harriott dominates throughout, playing accessibly and free, his impassioned solos soaring to meet Mayer’s Indian challenge. Chandrahas Paigankar’s droning tamboura and Keshav Sathe’s pulsing tabla combine with Coleridge Goode’s swinging bass and Allan Ganley’s tasteful drums to create an uniquely exotic groove.

“Multani” follows with 11-minutes of equally magical and compelling music, as Mayer opens up his composition with virtuosic statements on violin, while Diwan Motihar deftly plucks his sitar with a mystical flair. When the horns come in, their cohesively chaotic interactions sound strangely like something off Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch. At 2 1/2 minutes in length, the kitschy (and catchy) “Acka Raga” is the perfect track to throw on any cool ’60s mix (it was apparently the theme song to the BBC’s old-school quiz show, “Ask The Family”). The album ends with “Subject,” a tune that starts off sounding like the irritating theme music to the NPR show, “All Things Considered,” before rebounding to a close with some rousing swing from Harriott’s horn.

One of the most fully realized and natural sounding mergers of different musical idioms, Indo-Jazz Fusions broke new ground with its modal free-jazz stylings and heavy use of indigenous instrumentation and players. The album’s tight musicianship and compositional excellence clearly set the standard for future East-West excursions by such jazzers as Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, and John McLaughlin. Classic creators of an authentic Indian-jazz, the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet deserves at least as much attention as its more commercially savvy successors in jazz and world music have enjoyed.

Date: October 6, 1996 (recording)
Release: India Archive Music #1042
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I first heard of Debashish Bhattacharya from guitar master Nels Cline, who raved about this album on the “What I’ve Been Listening to Lately” section of his website. Cline gushed,

“What a find this man is! He rocks!! Besides his amazing phrasing and melodic invention (common among scary Indian classical players…), he adds some chording and fingerstyle to his improvisations with great effectiveness.”

Trusting Nels’ taste, I bought it cold, figuring that with a name like Hindustani Slide Guitar, it had to be good. Upon hearing the first few ultra-mellow minutes of the opening Raga Saraswati, I experienced a brief feeling of buyers’ remorse. In a snap judgment I thought, this doesn’t rock, this sounds like the spacey Indian mood music they play at the Bodhi Tree (an irritatingly Hollywood New Age megastore that sells such indispensable accessories as the chakra pillow, “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” video, and of course, the Tao-Sex Decoder). I lit some Nag Champa incense, picked up a magazine, and decided to accept the album as pleasantly exotic background music.

About 20 minutes into the lengthy, three-part Raga Saraswati (named after the Indian goddess of music and learning), my magazine (and jaw) hit the floor, as fiery licks from the Jimi Hendrix of Indian guitar swirled hypnotically out of my speakers to mingle with the incense. Like a mystic reaching for a holy book, I opened the CD booklet and read:

“Debashish says that when he is playing this raga he visualizes the goddess, golden in color, riding gracefully on her customary vehicle, the swan.”

As the kaleidoscopic waves of sounds washed over me, I felt strangely like Peter Sellers in the 1967 film, “The Party.”

With meditative flights of mind-boggling virtuosity, Debashish and his self-designed 22-stringed acoustic instrument have boldly reshaped a vibrant and distinctly Indian guitar form, the Hindustani slide. Since the age of four, this accomplished musician and singer has studied intensively with some of India’s greatest musical gurus, learning to master not only the slide guitar, but also the tabla, sitar as well as several Indian classical vocal styles.

Because of his broad musical training, Debashish is able to draw upon a wide array of sounds, techniques and impulses in his playing. As he explains,

“I am not doing anything new right now—I can tell you—because it is already in the history of Indian classical music. But the synthesis of it is what is new…I have tried to synthesize all the possible [styles of] music whish is already in our tradition.”

Debashish plays his instrument like no other, sitting cross legged, guitar held on his lap, sliding a small steel bar across the stings with one hand while metal finger and a tortoise shell thumb picks pluck furiously away on the other. Combining this inimitable technique with the deepest spiritual feeling, Debashish’s guitar speaks with all the expressive nuance and melodic range of the human voice.

While few outside his native land have ever heard of him, Debashish ranks among the greatest slide guitarists in the world. Regarded as a national treasure, he was awarded the President of India award at the age of 21. His incredible talents even reached the ears of guitarist John McLaughlin, who invited Debashish to join him in the studio and on tour with his acclaimed Indo-jazz band, Shakti. Like McLaughlin’s more meaningful work, Hindustani Slide Guitar is all about feeling, with masterful technique eclipsed by sheer emotion. Richly satisfying and heavy with mood, it showcases one of India’s most radiant musical voices at the peak of his powers, making it background music for the gods and goddesses.

Date: June 11, 1968
Release: PRESTIGE OJC-355-2
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Adventurous fusions of Indian, psychedelic, rock, funk, and jazz music by one of the great risk-takers of the electric guitar. Baiyina features fluid guitars, exotic Indian percussion and drone instruments, unique time signatures, swirling flute and sax, deep grooving bass, and in-the-pocket drumming, making it one of the most unique acid-drenched albums to come out of the late 60s. As the album’s subtitle reads: “A psychedelic excursion through the magical mysteries of the Koran.” Indeed, each track takes its inspiration and name from different parts of the Koran.

This was a pioneering endeavor in fusion, and as such it is free of the glitzy commercial touches that have rightly given the genre a bad name. Unlike most jazz guitarists, Martino is not a conservative background player or a self-indulgent soloist intent on putting his technical skills on display. A passionate musician of substantial talents, he was often the guitarist of choice for the Young Lions of the avant-garde.

On the title track, Martino and company establish a contagious rhythm that is both funky and exotic. True to the dictates of Indian music, the rhythm is held until it captivates the listener in hypnotic bliss, providing the perfect context for Martino to launch into one of his inspired explorations. “Where Love’s a Grown-Up God” is built around a spicy groove that was the likely source of inspiration for Curtis Mayfield‘s “Pusherman” off of the Super Fly soundtrack. ” Martino’s ideas flow as if divinely inspired during a masterful guitar break in the middle of the tune. This track is absolutely golden. On “Distant Land,” Gregory Herbert‘s sax solo builds with brooding intensity over the unusual time signatures. Bass giant Richard Davis is miraculous, effortlessly inventing Indian-groove music as if it had been in his head for years.

Ahead of its time, Baiyina is a complex and cross-cultural excursion into a mystical and funky realm. Perfectly complements a dinner of saffron-spiced soul food.

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Date: March 23, 1999
Release: Motel Records #3
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Bombay the Hard Way plays like the soundtrack to some imaginary 1970s B-films with names like Shaft’s Bad-Ass Pilgrimage To India or Ganges Ghetto Payback. Featuring the music of Indian composers (and brothers) Anandji and Kalyanji Shah, who wrote and produced soundtracks for the so-called “Brownsploitation” films made in India’s “Bollywood” during the 60s and 70s, this saffron-funk project is the brain-child of Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, Bay Area producer / remixer of Dr. Octagon fame, with additional beats provided by the immensely talented DJ Shadow. The end product is a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation.

While this East meets West mixture is incredibly funky, there are few innovations or surprises within. Beyond the sweeping and intense orchestrations of the opening track, “Bombay 405 Miles,” the album tends to value mood and groove over tunes.

That said, there are still some particularly strong standouts. “The Good, The Bad, And The Chutney” and “Inspector Jay From Dehli” are mysterious Spy-thriller grooves, loaded with sitars, spacey synths, orchestral breaks, and DJ Shadow‘s laid back beats. Like much of the album, these two songs are heavily spiced Indian approximations of the cinematic funk found on Blaxploitation soundtracks by Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Willie Hutch.

“Professor Pyarelal” is a deliciously slow Barry White-styled groove that blends funky flute, bass, and drums with atmospheric synthesizer and jazz piano. The album’s only song with lyrics, “Ganges A Go-Go,” features a sound straight out of the Indian quarter of London’s “swinging 60s” scene. Over a driving Go-Go beat and Eastern-flavored horn arrangements, a handful of male and female singers (with cute Indian accents) belt out the lines,

“I got no time to think / Cuz’ I need somebody to love / Yeah! / Baby, I love you so / But you can’t love me more / Why don’t you hold me closer / And I’ll give you more / Yeah!”

With lyrics like that, this song is destined to wind up on one of my more kitchy MustHear.com mixes. Throughout the album, there are fun snatches of dialogue lifted straight out of vintage “brownsploitation” films. These digressions add to the overall enjoyment, helping to make Bombay the Hard Way a classic party record for the new millennium.

Date: Jun 1, 1972 – Jun 6, 1972 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #63980
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An electrified and multidimensional burst of ass-shaking funk straight from the master himself. If Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix took a space ship to India together, they very well might have come up with something approximating On The Corner.

This utterly unique and unprecedented recording was savaged by a lot of the critics of its day. They blasted Miles for creating a new “anti-jazz” that fundamentally violated the genre’s integrity. Reviled as the jazz anti-Christ, his playing on this recording was indeed demonic. His trumpet spits out wah-wah distorted licks of fire and nastiness, and he grinds on the organ like it was a cheap date. He masterfully tangles and intertwines the varied sounds of the sitar, conga, electric guitar, tabla, organ, and electric bass to create thickly-layered rhythms of dazzling complexity. He throws in some heavy licks on top of it all, hitting hard with quick and punchy bursts from his horn that make the groove throb.

This explosive session is anything but harmless, as it still remains the album that the purists most love to hate. Brimming with the risky inventiveness of untested ideas, Miles pushed the envelope a little too far for many of the less visionary critics with On The Corner. If Bitches Brew was the first bombshell Miles dropped on the jazz world, this surely was the second. Still, with both recordings, Miles showed why its better to burn as a devil in the fire than rot as an angel in the wings.

Date: 1968 (original release)
Release: Columbia #CK-9296
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East 6th Street in New York City is one of the stranger places in the city. There are about 15 Indian restaurants on one block. Barkers stand out front of the restaurants announcing that their restaurant is the best. The food at all of these restaurants is alarmingly similar; the joke goes that there is really only one kitchen in the back, spanning the length of the street. We usually go to a place called Panna II, which is unrelentingly garish: chili pepper Christmas lights hang from the ceiling in the hundreds so you have to bend down to walk. They play what is called “modern Indian music,” which sounds like old Indian music with a backbeat and electric guitars. It’s a music as garish as the decor. And if I haven’t listened in a while, it always sends me running back to Ravi Shankar.

From the moment I heard this album, which was recorded in the early 1960s, I was a fan of Shankar’s, despite my complete ignorance. As a novice, one can gain some understanding of this seemingly alien music. The adventurous person of a certain age has heard of the world-famous Ravi Shankar because of his middle-brow association with the late George Harrison and his work with such high-brows as Philip Glass (on a horrendous album called Passages), but until there is some explanation of what to listen for, it’s all very confusing.

Evoking that feeling of instant mastery is the point of The Sounds Of India, which is appropriately subtitled “An Introduction to Indian Music.” It holds out its hand to the ignorant and does its job well. If Shankar didn’t set out to become emblematic of an entire culture’s sound, he at least set out to educate the West. The first track on this disc is a 4-minute primer on the rich structure of classical Indian music, which is not like classical music in the West.

Haydn and Mozart probably never improvised during a single performance in their lives. Not so with Indian classical. The first thing you hear on the disc is a few plunks on a sitar, then the cascading of the strings, like a harp, and then Ravi Shankar says (this is a slightly edited transcription; the ellipses are musical interludes):

“Ragas are precise melody forms. A raga is not a mere scale…. Nor is it a mood…. Each raga has its own ascending and descending movement…. The soloist does a free improvisation, known as Alap, after which he starts the theme based on a rhythmic framework known as Tala. He can choose from many Talas…”

Some Talas, he explains, have 16 beats, some have 10. He demonstrates, actually counting the beats for the first few run-throughs, then just counting each time he comes back around to one. He shows how the rhythm gets faster and faster, showing off a little bit to wow the Western listener, for whom he has these words of advice:

“The Western listener will appreciate and enjoy our music more if he listens with an open and relaxed mind without expecting to hear harmony, counterpoint or other elements prominent in western music. Neither should our music be thought of as akin to jazz, despite the improvisation and exciting rhythms present in both kinds of music.”

But this is misleading. Why not explore those similarities? He did himself, later meeting and giving lessons to John Coltrane and Don Ellis, and composing music for Buddy Rich and John Handy. (Don’t we wish we had a disc of Miles or Bird explaining it all, breaking it down for us? On second thought, we probably don’t need it, because what those guys played was much less complicated than this.) Why not listen to it as we listen to jazz? I listen for a mood, an overarching theme, the microfelicities of the improvisations. He might be introducing us to this music, but we don’t have to obey him absolutely.

This album came about in part from Shankar’s dismay over the ignorance of the West about Eastern music. He gained prominance, in part, from his work on the music for Satyajit Ray’s debut film “Pather Panchali,” a kind of Indian “400 Blows.” Much later, he won an Oscar for his work on Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi.” In 1952, Shankar met the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who would say later that composers Georges Enesco and Bela Bartok and Shankar were the greatest musicians he had known. High praise indeed.

Most important for the purposes of popular music, in 1966 Shankar met George Harrison. Shankar became famous in the West, even playing at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. He obviously didn’t insulate himself from other music, but at the same time he desired Westerners to hear Indian music in a pure form.

Which is what this disc gives us. The first full musical track, “Dadra,” is a moody but joyful synapse fryer. It starts out restrained, then lets loose. The tabla player follows Shankar, beating out a funky groove, if one can say this about Indian music. The second track, “Maru-Bihag,” is my favorite, sad, wise, forlorn, and hopeful. It begins with a 30-second explanation of the raga by Shankar. “Maru-Bihag” is described as an evening raga in the liner notes, and that just seems right, as if it would be perfect to listen to at sunset. It is followed by “Bhimpalasi,” which is preceded by another explanation. It is described as having “a mood of tenderness; the suppressed longing of a lover, but serene, with dignity, and yet throbbing with deep emotion.” OK, fine. The disc ends with “Sindhi-Bhairavi,” a morning raga, quiet without much from the tabla, the drum, or the tambura, the drone instrument.

Indian music can put you in a meditative state, in the way that great literature can. It can put you in what novelist and theorist John Gardner called a “vivid and continuous dream,” which he called the highest ambition of art. But I’ve always disagreed with Gardner that that’s it. A great book, in my mind, will have sentences that call attention to themselves, and because we are adaptable, we get pleasure from those sentences and then are able to return to the dream. I think that art should call attention to itself, otherwise it’s just entertainment. And Shankar’s music, though bringing to the listener a very vivid and continuous dream, is enough of an artist to call attention to himself. He is such a genius that even the untrained ear (mine) can hear how wonderful it is, in the same way my ears heard what was so astonishing about Miles Davis for the first time.

But those pleasures are often intellectual ones. What is so astonishing about Ravi Shankar‘s music is that while it is endlessly fascinating from that standpoint, what matters most is that this is music that can make you happy and bring you to tears, sometimes in the same moment.