The history of collaboration between Indian and Western musicians dates to the 1960s, when Ravi Shankar first started playing alongside Western musicians. Ravi Shankar was present at the music extravaganza known as “Woodstock”. In subsequent years, the sarod maestro, Ali Akbar Khan, and the tabla maestro, Alla Rakha, the father of Zakir Hussain, also worked with Western musicians. Other successful collaborations over the years have been between Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, Ustad Sultan Khan (on the sarangi) and Marco Guinar (on he Spanish guitar), and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Ry Cooder.
More recently, the Indian mandolin virtuoso, a young man by the name of U. Srinivasan, produced an album, released under the label “Real World”, in collaboration with Michael Brook. The album, called Dream, has four numbers, and the excerpt here is from “Think”, with U. Srinivas on the electric mandolin, Nigel Kennedy on violin, Nana Vasconcelos on percussion, and Caroline Lavelle on the cello.
Real World Records Ltd. CAROL 235-2 (1704-62352-2)