EMI knew what they were about when in 1966 they recorded Yehudi
Menuhin with Ravi Shankar. The Beatles were at what proved to
be a long sustained zenith. They had taken up Transcendental
Meditation and travelled to India to study with the Maharishi.
That pilgrimage turned out to be a bit of debacle but for a
while East did indeed meet West in a glare of publicity. George
Harrison among The Beatles sustained the Indian connection the
longest and was a pupil of Shankar. Indeed Harrison introduced
Indian instruments into Norwegian Wood.
On the first disc in recordings ranging through the 1960s to
the 1980s Menuhin vies with and reacts to Shankar's sitar. You
can hear this in Swara-Kakali which echoes and sways
with possessed virtuosity. The Raga-Piloo is more meditative.
Yet Menuhin does not hold back with the zigeuner stuff amid
the haze established by sitar and tabla. Those wayward harmonies
in Dhun must surely have been in Paul McCartney's mind
in writing Mull of Kintyre. Twilight Mood reminds
me of the oriental music of Alan Hovhaness and Henry Cowell.
It also makes me wonder what on earth John Foulds' lost Symphony
of East and West might have sounded like. He wrote it as
music director of All-India Radio for an ensemble of native
Indian instruments and a Western orchestra. Its manuscript was
lost in India some time during the 1930s-1940s. As a matter
of interest Shankar too held a senior executive position in
AIR but a couple of decades after Foulds' death.
The richly recorded Raga Kaushi Kanhara captures every
plangent resonating sway and tanpura impact. It's fascinating
to hear Shankar and his colleagues in recordings from before
the Menuhin collaborations in studio in 1963-65. These can be
found on the second disc. They were made when Shankar was something
of an exotic star in the USA. These recordings from the 1960s
cannot escape discreet analogue hiss. The tracks are grouped
around the album names - "India's Master Musician",
"Portrait of Genius" and "Sound of the Sitar".
Most interesting here is the inventive use of instruments that
conventional classical ears would regard as exotic such as the
tanpura, tabla-tarang, dholak, santoor and kartal. This is heard
to strongest effect in the Tala Rasa Ranga where ear-tickling
stereo effects are the order of the day. The flute, played by
Paul Horn, adds a Western reference point but its sinuous progress
sounds completely Indian. Tala Tabla Rasang is especially
beguiling - in fact the highlights of this set can be found
under "Portrait of Genius".
It will be painfully obvious that I lack the vocabulary or knowledge
to touch on anything other than the superficialities in this
case but one thing I did notice is that a sort of convention
for opening these pieces is a quasi-metallic arpeggio effect.
It’s heard at the start of many of these pieces. The other notable
aspect is that this music not infrequently sounds as if it had
Scottish Gaelic roots.
For a complete change do try this Shankar album. It could hardly
be bettered for the curious beginner. As to how true experts
would assess this music-making or its authenticity as regards
autochthonous sources I do not know.
The playing time is pretty generous giving you access to approaching
two and a half hours of Shankar's musical world – a world that
had room for other musicians and which he was happy to share.
Rob Barnett
Ravi Shankar (sitar); Yehudi Menuhin and friends 
