Word: sitars
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Such attention as he got came in oddball ways. In 1965 he created a vogue for raga-rock, by introducing the sitar in Norwegian Wood. It was he who interested the rest of the Beatles in transcendental meditation. For years George lived in a ranch house painted in psychedelic colors. He finally surrendered it, but only for a 30-room Gothic mansion complete with secret doors and sculptured gnomes. No superstar, but no ordinary man either was George Harrison...
Whales are gentle, playful creatures with enormous brains and extraordinary hearing. According to Cetologist Roger S. Payne of the New York Zoological Society, whales communicate with one another by "singing" at deep submarine frequencies, sounding like sitar concertos. Other scientists are trying to discover how whales can dive to 7,000 ft., where the pressure would compress a human lungful of air to a thin fluid, and then resurface with no ill effects. But for all their mystery, whales have interested men mainly because they have oil within their hulks. In the past decade alone, 607,000 have been slaughtered...
...raga's path seems to change on the first beat of each cycle, which acts as a convergence point for the interplay of the two instrumentalists. Mirza sometimes suggests a rhythm in his strumming, picking right hand (the lute-like sitar is played vaguely like a guitar) which Khan then develops more fully during the coming cycle...
...other times, Khan pursues a new, syncopated tempo, while Mirza takes the first note as a starting point for "bending the pitch" of the next interval, to be played in "meend," a technique similar to the "blueing" of notes in jazz. "The beauty of the sitar lies in pulling the notes from one fret to another," according to Mirza. The drawn-out sounds create the strange, modal, wailing effect which western ears find so intriguing...
...BEATLES did a great deal for sitar music, but they knew nothing about it," Mirza told me last week. "They exploited it for the pop mania. There has been a great sinking of Indian music in the United States during the last year because of its commercialization and exploitation. Trying to cater to all tastes like a very bad cook has been responsible for its demise from interest...