Word: shankar
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...music in California. Under the supervision of D. A. Pennebaker, who made Don't Look Back, the one widely seen verite documentary, more than half a dozen cameramen prowled the crowd catching the mood-but not the meaning-of the event. Several performers (Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar) come through with a jolting, immediate intensity, but watching Monterey Pop is like listening to an LP with pictures. Twenty years from now, the film may have value as a historical curiosity. Surely the sight of such frenetically phony stunts as Jimi Hendrix mounting, igniting and finally destroying his electric...
...bond with Bach-and why not? The very improbability of it appeals to their fanciful eclecticism; besides, they like the way his music is melodic but not meandering, emotional but not sentimental. Blues-Rock Singer Paul Butterfield, 27, names Bach his favorite music along with the blues and Ravi Shankar. "I don't always know what Bach is doing," says Butterfield, "but we seem to be friends." One of last year's hit records, A Whiter Shade of Pale, by England's Procol Harum, was arranged around an organ theme inspired by Bach's organ setting...
...Shankar also proved something else: that Indian music means a lot more than just the sitar and its familiar partners, the two-drum tabla and the string-drone tamboura. Indian music has its origins in Vedic hymns that date back 2,000 years. Indians have always believed that music has the power to change human destiny. Their sacred chants had to be intoned just so; a mistake could ruin everything. Thus, if Vocalist Jitendra Abhisheki seemed ner vous as he came out for a selection of Vedic chants, it was understandable. But his nasal, three-note invocation to Saraswati, goddess...
...addition to vocal music, Shankar presented ten masters of strange-sounding wind and percussion instruments-the sarod, santoor, shehnai, sarangi, mri-dangam and venu. It was a first of sorts when the players all padded onstage to perform Shankar's ensemble piece, V-7½, a vigorous ten-minute raga played at a tricky 7½ beats to the bar. It was also the first time that so many Indian musicians had been seen west of Bombay on one Oriental...
...Shankar's display of musical hypnotism clearly dramatized the essential difference between Western and Indian music. Much of Western music is an ex pressive artistic message delivered-as if in a package-directly to the listener. Indian music attempts to induce a loftier, more profound emotional and spiritual state in the listener through a steady, stroboscopic kind of rhythmic and melodic bedazzlement. At the height of a raga, says Shankar, "it is utter joy, uninhibited, that an artist experiences. The raga, the musician, the listeners, all become one." That is something that India's Ravi Shankar...