Ravi Shankar -

Sounds of India

Posted: August 25th, 2008

Date: 1968 (original release)
Release: Columbia #CK-9296
Cover Art: view / download
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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.