Word: sitars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shankar should know. After the Beatles introduced the resonant sound of the stringed sitar to rock in Norwegian Wood (1965) and their imitators began twanging along, Shankar suddenly found himself the hero of the pop, hippie and fashion worlds. Then, just as suddenly, the fad passed. The teeny-boppers returned to their Bee Gees, and the hippies began playing Erik Satie at their acid parties. Though dismayed by the abruptness of it all, Shankar realized that it was probably just as well. With good reason. Horror of horrors, he confided, "they took me for a pop musician...
...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...
...slightly raised platform a musician (Jeff Fuller) sits improvising, in an appropriate raga, a preludial alapa on his sitar. Gradually a number of young men enter, wearing leis of orange and yellow flowers, and assume yoga positions. As bowls of incense waft their frangance, the sitar is joined off-stage by the traditional tambura drone and tabla rhythms...
...could I would have the radio on all day." He was bitter about gimmickry (the Jeff Beck Group's first album just out on Epic, is called 'Truth' because the Group feels that it is an honest album with no tricks.) He ridiculed the Beatles' experiments with sitar music "You know how long it takes to learn that instrument? 7 years. and there's the master who's 50 and still learning...
...jewels, incidentally, were genuine: about $2,000,000 worth used in the course of the picture-most of them came from Bulgari in Rome. Genuine, too, was the Goforth villa, built for the occasion in Sardinia and fitted out with a real monkey, a real myna bird and real sitar-strumming Indians. But not real acting. And certainly not much real camp. About the only amusing scene in the film is the entrance of Noel Coward, a minor character known as the Witch of Capri, clad in a brown dinner jacket and riding pig-a-back on a servant...