Ragas on Saxophone

If this album contained anything other than ragas on saxophone any listener's disappointment would be understandable. Fortunately Phil Scarff delivers what he promises and, despite the prosaic title, this is an album of great imagination. Recorded live at a concert in Chandrapur, it features Scarff as soloist, accompanied by Bhushan Parchure on tabla.

We have heard ragas on saxophone before from the likes of Kadri Gopalnath, whom Scarff has had the honour of playing with before, but more familiar to Western ears, perhaps, is the influence of Indian music on Western saxophonists: beginning with players such as John Coltrane and continuing with others like John Handy who worked with the great Ali Akbar Khan and Dr L Subramaniam on the fantastic Rainbow.

Rather than using Indian musical elements in distinctly Western music however, the American Scarff approaches the ragas in a sensitively traditional way, making only the adaptations necessary to perform this music on sax. Despite this, the sound is unavoidably modern in a pleasing and infectious way. This is perhaps because we are more used to hearing ragas on stringed instruments but we can hear from this album that they work equally well on any instrument, saxophone included.