Rewind album: The Sounds of India

Ravi Shankar
Columbia

Most music fans outside India can recognise the sound of the sitar - and that is mostly due to Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar.

Although Shankar was not the first sitar player to perform in the West, he spent more than 50 years bringing Indian music to international audiences. Along the way, he won the support and friendship of luminaries such as violinist Yehudi Menuhin and The Beatles' George Harrison, who worked with him off and on until the guitarist's death in 2001.

Shankar was already well known by the musical cognoscenti when he released The Sounds of India in 1968, but this album was an attempt to take Indian music further into the mainstream. With this in mind, Shankar introduced each track with a short lecture about the different aspects of Indian music.

The genre is both highly mathematical and esoteric, and a knowledge of the basics is needed to make sense of even these explanations. But they do serve to give the music some context.

The sitar is a magnificent instrument often thought to be similar to the guitar - which is why guitarists such as Harrison and the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones were attracted to it. Harrison, who studied with Shankar, played it on Beatles tracks including Norwegian Wood and Within You, Without You. But he found it too difficult to master and gave it up.