WOEBOT

"Routes to India." Indian Music Part One.

"You know the Sufi story that when God created the body, the soul didn't want to go inside. The soul could see that this was going to be a trap, it was going to be in this cumbersome thing and it was a life of hardship from there on. So God used music to lure the soul into the body. And the reason God did this is that the soul did not understand why it had to take the body and come to earth. The reason the soul had to enter the body and come to earth is so that it could study music, because sound is capable of presenting the most perfect model of universal structure....." La Monte Young Interview in Halana 1995.

Now breathe out. Forget about it. It's either hilarious or profound. It's the deeper, more colourful imagistic spin on the whole "atomic/musical vibration is the very substance of the universe" shtick. Makes no difference if you believe it or not, though often those who do wear flares on their flares. It's JUST a theory of theorising after all. Just an opinion.

India is a long way away. Go there in a plane and you're still not there. All those millions of people breathing the same air as you, walking the same earth, yet look them in the eye, and they're fixed on something wholly alien. What's it all about? What is that essential spark which unites them and you? If you knew what it was you'd be a step closer to knowing what it means to be human. Though plenty of people chose to take the Indian belief system as a given and work their way backwards. Get fixed up with a Guru, bosh in a few sitars. The two aims aren't mutually exclusive though synthesis/deeper-understanding seems to produce the more powerful music.

This piece is a preamble to Part 2 (Indian Classical music). This is "Routes to India" cos I'm going to try and take you there, to "The Real Deal". We're going to follow the lines of flight the myriad points of exit which lead to Indian Music proper, and consider what was going on in the minds of these voyagers.

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The explosion of interest in the music of the far east is usually dated from Debussy being confronted by Javanese Gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, the influence filtering into works like "Prelude A L'Apres-Midi D'Un Faune." Gamelan has an inordinately huge impact on Classical Music, also via figures like Benjamin Britten, Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell and John Cage. Gamelan got the gig in the 20th century to represent "the other". The newly opened LSO concert hall (beside my house) even has a Gamelan Room! I went to a rehearsal, expecting, well, Gamelan, and got a bunch of cast-offs from the third violins in a dopey facsimile of traditional garb. How embarrasing! Even Chinese music gets bigger props via Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin." I can't think of any examples of Indian Music influencing Western music much before this: (though I'd be delighted to be proved wrong)

Yusef is a real trooper. He was a former Sun Ra alumni, you'd expect Ra to have picked up on Indian Music, as a rule he's first through the gate for EVERYTHING. Indeed the track "India" appears on Sun Ra's Super Sonic Jazz (1957), though maybe that's in the vein of languid lower-key romp, a bit of typical Ra kitsch, a "title" rather than any kind of exploration. Lateef, on the other hand, can claim a core interest in 3rd World music, still plugging away at it. He's now termed a "New Age" artist (meaningless marketing babble but also the heading under which he won a Grammy in 1987 for "Little Symphony"). In short we'll give him the credit. This from 1961, loveliest track "The Plum Blossom" played on a (er...um...) Chinese Globular Flute.

Yeah we're coming to Coltrane. This LP from 1963, which has always enjoyed a shadowy reputation thanks to successive generations of Ra-adulation. The Duke in his later years took the self-appointed role of global ambassador for Jazz. It's INCREDIBLE that he, during these tours, managed to touch base with both Count Ossie & The Mystical Revelation of Rastafari in Jamaica and Mulatu in Ethiopia, giving both crews the Ellington "thumbs-up." This LP has more than a little touch of the Exotica to it.

Here I'd defer to David Toop's excellent book of the same name. Slightly glossed over at the time, and maybe not packing the punch of "Ocean of Sound" (yeah YOU try and follow that!), it bequeathed us with at least two useful concepts. Firstly that "Exotica" was in many ways a convenient marketing umbrella for musics which wouldn't fit to easily in other categories. Hence something Like Eden Ahbez's deeply musical "Eden's Island", a utopian beatnik fantasy and Tom Jobim's widescreen "Matita Perê" get chucked in the bin, and are subsequently tarred with the "Hawaiian-shirt-Suburban-Barbecue" brush, when their progeny is infinitely more complicated. Secondly, and this sort of contradicts the last point, Toop suggests that the "fake" is as valid as the "real". In enjoying first-world music that is influenced by the 3rd world this is a profoundly liberating tool. Bored shitless by the insistently authentic fusions of Frederic Galliano and Banco de Gaia, yeah right you guys are "for real", well sweat not, cos the inauthentic is just as valid and just and subsequently influential on the source as the inauthentic. Valid like Panjabi MC's Knightrider samples. Inauthentic like "My Life in the bush of Ghosts." I'd refer you to this on Thursday May 6th

Why were all these Jazz musicians listening to Indian Classical Music? Certainly there was an element of fascination with the musician's virtuosity, an interest in the open/closed model of Indian music (improvisation within a structure) and filtering through Beatnik literature a curiosity in Eastern thought. But I reckon, and here I go AGAIN making sweeping suggestions about Afro-American culture (whiteys-in-conference pt.2), that in addressing Indian Culture, which was clearly on a par, if not more sophisticated than the Western Classical tradition, they might transcend the cultural restrictions imposed on their own "funk"/"jazz", the denigrated/abused music they practised, ever struggling for the recognition of it's artistry and validity. Beyond this there is the issue of attempting to reach for one's own inner humanity, by seeking the common elements across cultures. Coltrane nothing if not a searcher. "India" here from 1963.

Menuhin a "searcher" too. This 1966. A wonderful man. Maybe the only to be able to go head-to-head as an Instrumentalist with Ravi and not come out looking daft. Shankar, in case you didn't know, believed in the sub-continent itself to be the "living embodiment of Hindustani music." Like his music or not (not, in my case), as far as the authorities of this music reckon, none can test. Of course there's a Shankar/Phillip Glass record too, Glass consistently insisting his experience of transcribing Shankar's parts in late 60's Paris was the fundamental inspiration behind his chosen path. Minimalism alone in trying to ingest Indian Classical Music, to use it's forms as tropes, not it's instrumentation and tuning as colours.

Standing in here for The Beatles's "Tomorrow Never Knows", fruit of George Harrison's 5-minute sitar lessons with Ravi, The Stones's "Paint it Black" and the legion of Raga Rock Psych Punk renegades. Worthy of a mention too Peter Seller's "The Party" (groan). Indian music on the worldwide stage. Easy to dismiss, though Monsoon's Sheila Chandra (last through the gate as far as I'm concerned) had a strong Beatles twist to their harmonies. BTW earlier comments re:The Inauthentic. Maybe the closest Hendrix came to Shankar was the Monterey Pop Festival on 1967. Shankar's fee was ENORMOUS apparently and he got paid before he went on stage. He HATED the other acts.

Impressively early offering in 1967 from Joe Harriott and John Mayer. Possibly the first example of session with both Jazz and Indian musicians. The results are fairly patchy, the rhythms clumsy, the other LP they recorded together maybe better, though "Acka Raga" is charming. Needed to left in the oven longer. Ananda Shankar "Streets of Calcutta" etc

This incredibly rare. Jazz from India, so the other side of the coin to the "Indo-Jazz Fusions" of the other record. In contrast a quite stunning record in parts, I kid you not, heavily reminiscent of a pre-amplification Led Zeppelin. My friend has another LP, "Jazz meets Raga" which he found in Geneva, once again Bombay studio-time freed up for maverick Indian Beatniks, sitars played like guitars, still quite brilliant. Hilariously the line-up reads all Indian names on both records with the exception of a "Tony D'Casta" on drums. Who the hell is he? Heavy-scented.

It all took off in the seventies, largely in part to this nutter Pandit Pran Nath, La Monte's assumed guru. Pran Nath spent his formative years becoming part of the Kirana tradition of singers, involving years and years spent naked living in a cave, you guessed it, singing. I've included this record in this "Routes to India" line-up because, while it's less of a "fusion" than the one he recorded with La Monte and Marian (though that pure in intensity), it's released on Alan Douglas's label. Douglas was the cosmopolitan hipster behind records by The Last Poets, Lightin' Rod, Eric Dolphy, John McClaughlin and Jimi Hendrix (Doriella Du Fontaine). Pran Nath taught Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, Jon Hassell, Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt amongst others. Only La Monte seemed content to put up with this cantankerous old bastard, to wipe his nose with enough devotion to earn the mantle of pupil. Though Pran Nath had endured FAR worse in his quest to become a singer. Of all Western musicians Pran Nath only had respect for Coltrane, La Monte's offering's usually sniffed at (mild praise for "The Well-tuned Piano", ha ha).

Pran Nath's other dedicated pupil. This marathon organ work-out on the Shandar label pursuing India over the course of 4 sides. In fact Steve Reich being the only one of the "Big Four" Minimalists NOT to claim influence from India. He chose West Africa. There's no getting away from it, and it amazes me how little mention of made of them in the blog circuit (I don't touch anymore since......well that's my excuse!), but DRUGS play an important factor in the cult of India. I know for a fact that La Monte has a "steady" opium habit, indeed detractors say (scandalously) that much of the Dia Foundation grant went on keeping him and Marian stoked. Marijuana too. I'll bet Terry Riley smokes a hell of a lot of pot. How on earth would you play repetitive organ like this ALL NIGHT otherwise? How would you listen to it all night? It's probably the biggest single tourist attraction that continent has, and why it was number one destination on the Hippy Trail.

These together. Lurking Gurus ahoy. McLaughlin's Sri Chimnoy. Alice's Swami Satchdiananda. All parties quite clearly bonkers. Chromatic soupy Bollywood orchestras on the one hand, insanely over-played Tablas on the other. Approach with caution.

Not all 70s "Indo-Jazz" vomitous. Don Cherry forged a trans-global synthesis that aimed at understanding and imbibing the essence of disparate World Musics, building a "fusion" (terrible word to be saddled with) of intrinsic character. However stop short of Codona (and all ECM for that matter), though I saw Cherry in Glasgow in 1993 and he was a joy. Moki plays Tambura on this record, better yet is Cherry's AMAZING "Brown Rice" LP (not included here cos the cover aint so pretty and homespun). "Malakuns" off that LP the living shit, as powerful and intense as this...

...to which legend Badal Roy contributed tabla for "Black Satin." Terror on wax. Not much to be added to what Lester Bangs said.

This a fascinating document I picked up in Amsterdam. Baba Ram Dass was Timothy Leary's "second-in-command", author of "Be Here Now." It's interesting here to join the dots between Leary's philosophy (and if you haven't read the amazing "Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream" get thee hence) and India, where obviously Ram Dass washed up. This record by a Bhagavan Dass (some relation or clone?) features a quote from Ram Dass on the cover: "This is what I mean", the record sporting the same TERRIBLE caterwauling that issues from La Monte's "The Black Album", these white dudes sure sound like wrinkly frogs. Lines too from Leary to Rolf Ulrich Kaiser to this crew...

...and this lovely Indian-ate offering. The German node on the network.

Who has lost a lot of attraction in recent years through over-exposure but who still to my mind is a very worthwhile character. Did you know that "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts" started as a three-way project between Eno, Byrne and Hassell. Hassell brushed aside (discontent) by Byrne. So here we represent. In fact this from 1983 may be the final acceptable outpost of Indian-influenced music in the West. The diaspora begins to make it's mark on Western Culture itself? I can't find the time for your Trans-Global Undergrounds and your Asian Dub Foundations and your Talvin Singhs (in spite of the Sun Ra tie-in). Maybe I should be more opened-minded, maybe these older "fusions" get my approval purely as a result in the gulf of years, maybe THEY seemed goofy at the time.

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Curry. There, I said it.

Coming Next Week: Part 2: "The Real Deal"

Posted by Woebot at September 16, 2003 09:39 PM