shank

The meeting of Ananda Shankar, a sitar player who released a handful of psychedelic eastern-rock albums in the 1960's and the UK's State of Bengal (a.k.a. Sam Zaman) was a short-lived musical collaboration this past summer of two like-minded groups. They may have been generations apart, but both in their own way experimented with eastern instrumentation married with western popular music. For example, Shankar recorded sitar versions of the Stones "Jumping Jack Flash" and The Doors "Light my Fire" back in his Haight-Ashbury days, while today State of Bengal is one of the UK's most prominent Asian underground collectives blending eastern percussion and melody with drum-and-bass. It was supposed to be a win-win proposition; Shankar adding acoustic warmth to electronic beats, while Bengal would lend some extra kick (and relevance) to an old shoe. Walking On is the unfortunate result, a wishy-washy mess of an album without direction or heart. Shankar's sitar playing is adroit and predictable, while the tablas and DJ breaks just bop along on auto pilot to the point of banality. To make it worse, a searing electric guitar competes with Shankar, who's sitar playing is already so drenched in western scales and ideas they're pointless. Even the live cuts (of which there are two) lack energy and imagination. Instead of aiding one another and pursuing new ideas, Shankar and State of Bengal cancel each other out. - Jim

Totally mesmerizing cultural crossover instrumentals spotlighting moog, sitar and tabla. Ananda, a then young and enormous talent, produced around 1/2 a dozen of these albums blending his love for traditional Indian music and philosophy with "modern" Western pop music experimentation. The results are astonishing, and the lp featured here is probably his most popular (2 of the funkiest cuts made it onto a Blue Note comp a while back).

No more words for this True Monster. All his lp's were recently reissued onto vinyl, so get get 'em NOW. By the way, I hear Ananda was Ravi Shankar's nephew but don't quote me.

Ananda's first album released on Reprise in 1970 that served as his introduction to the world. Great, danceable covers of the Doors and Rolling Stones mixed with (even better) spaced-out ragas and other originals mixing sitar and moog with rock instrumentation.

This one's legendary and there's not much point in going on about it. Killer album you need to get.

A pioneering force behind the fusion of Eastern and Western musical traditions, Indian composer and choreographer Ananda Shankar was the son of renowned dancers Uday and Amala Shankar as well as the nephew of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. After studying sitar with Dr.Lalmani Mishra, he traveled to Los Angeles, earning international recognition with a 1970 self-titled release on Reprise which embraced both raga and psychedelia through the use of tabla and mridangam in conjunction with Moog synthesizers and electric guitars. Returning to India, Shankar subsequently created the mudavis, a kind of conceptual performance which presaged the multimedia innovations of the MTV generation in its combination of music, dance and visuals. In addition to scoring a series of films and television projects -- winning an Indian National Award for his efforts on the Mrinal Sen feature Chorus -- he composed a number of works for the dance troupe helmed by his wife, Tanusree; during the mid-1990s, Shankar's recordings became a common source of samples among West Coast rappers and Anglo-Asian drum-and-bass acts alike, and in 1998 toured Britain with State of Bengal. At just 56, he died of cardiac arrest in Calcutta on March 26, 1999; Walking On was posthumously issued on the Real World label the following year. ~ Jim