Ravi Shankar Dead

...my first meditation instructor, Roland, was once a very gifted sarangi player who had worked with Ravi Shankar. Perhaps Ravi Shankar's music was the first time I had heard a sitar, somewhere around the age of five-ish. I was entranced by the timbre: the elicitation of thousands of harmonics from wire and wood, the phasing of the notes against the sympathetic strings. Indian music isn't necessarily as narrative based as Western music, though stories are told. It's often more about timbre, which means that it's about how things attune (and detune) to (and from) one another.

Ravi Shankar got me thinking about materiality, the depth of a thing.

Once or twice I have played a sitar, very very badly. It's a very difficult instrument.

I liked how Ravi Shankar worked with Harrison on the Concert for Bangladesh and I liked how he worked in A Concert for George.