Collaborations

Given the high profile of the collaborators, it’s surprising that the various joint projects, undertaken over more than 25 years by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar and collected together here, are not better known or more celebrated. Friends since the late 1960s, Harrison signed Shankar to his Dark Horse Records label in 1973 and the following year released the album Shankar Family & Friends, which brought together Indian musicians such as tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha, vocalist Lakshmi Shankar, and Shivkumar Sharma on santoor (dulcimer) with Western rock musicians including not only Harrison but his fellow Beatle Ringo Starr, Tom Scott, Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner and Billy Preston. Long unavailable other than for silly money on eBay, this welcome reissue restores to a wider audience Lakshmi’s wonderful ‘I Am Missing You, produced by Harrison to sound like Phil Spector turned loose in Bollywood. But the major work is Shankar’s 27-minute ballet suite ‘Dream/Nightmare/Dawn’, which finds him thumbing his nose at the purists to create a thrilling fusion between Indian classical music and experimental jazz/prog-rock.

The second disc here is a Harrison-produced set of Shankar playing with a 17-piece Indian ensemble, originally released in 1976 under the title Ravi Shankar Music Festival From India. In fact, it was recorded live in London at the Royal Albert Hall two years earlier, during a concert for Harrison’s Material World Charitable Foundation. ‘Raga Jait’ is a characteristically dramatic Shankar solo sitar performance, accompanied on tabla by Alla Rakha. But in many ways it’s the percussion-heavy ensemble pieces that are most ear-catching (and eye-catching, too, on the separate DVD footage of the performance). The final collaboration included in this unusual box of delights is a set of ancient Sanskrit verses set to new arrangements by Shankar and produced by Harrison. Originally released in 1997 under the title Chants of India, the sacred voices are accompanied by hypnotic flute, cello and tambura (long-necked lute), and Harrison’s polished production cleverly balances accessibility and spirituality.