111. Ravi Shankar - The Sounds of India (1957)

1. An Introduction to Indian Music

2. Dardra

3. Maru-Bihag

4. Bhimpalasi

5. Sindhi-Bhairavi*

B+

Well this is another cock-up by Dimery and Co. This album was released in 1957. And really, it would have been nice for it to have been placed back then in the book, to provide a bit more context for all the Indian pastiches and raga rock that I've been wading through since the mid-60s.

And frankly I'm out of my depth with this one.

That said, this is a nice album. It seems like it would be a good introduction to Indian music, because it features traditional ragas, all well-played, broken up by explanatory introductions by Shankar about how the music is structured and played. One thing I find interesting is that the music is mostly built around tambura drones on single chords (a trick the Beatles pinched for "Tomorrow Never Knows"), with the tabla and sitar players improvising according to specific rules while playing off and occasionally mirroring one another. And yet, as Shankar notes in the introduction, this is not the free improvisation of jazz, and comparisons should be avoided. 

 The songs are also a lot more rhythmically adventurous than in most Western classical music - for example, there's the use of ten beats to the bar, broken up into groups of three and two, as opposed to the Western tendency towards a symmetrical eight beat bar.

That said, ten minutes of explanation by Shankar was nowhere near enough for me to grasp this music, and if I'm being honest I'd be hard pressed to even tell these tracks apart. This is interesting, and I enjoyed listening to it, but it's also noodly and rather samey. Possibly people who are more knowledgeable about Hindustani music would get more out of it, and back in 1957 when this was released it had the advantage of being of considerable novelty for western audiences. As it is, I quite like it as background music but I found it difficult to sit and listen to the whole thing. So a B+, which is my official "Quite good but I don't understand it" grade. Also I just really enjoy the tabla, so there's that.