VANDANA VISHWAS
MEERA ... THE LOVER (VandanaVishwas.com VV001)

This is a set of traditional Indian sugam sangeet with woody flute, tablas, dholak, sitar, finger cymbals, and all sortsa cool Indian instruments. Vandana sings well, beautifully in fact, and plays the tanpura, the four-stringed thingie that inaudibly anchors the "one" in Indian music. It's dreamy and reminds me of scores of film soundtracks, especially old black and white ones (except the sound is better) with lost love, statues that come to life, and so on. It's almost as if Vandana was the second coming of Lata (who is still alive, but I guess simultaneous rebirth is possible in a land of a million gods). The advance copy was spoiled by a lame voice over, explaining the lyrics. Now if you are going to have voice-over on an Indian music CD at least hire Amitabh or an Amitubby soundalike to give it a bit of credibility. But I gather the actual release will be free of such interference. Surprisingly, to me, the album was recorded in Toronto. The diaspora strikes again. On one hand people who leave their culture behind are capable of getting profoundly into it and finding aspects that are overlooked at home (look at all the Irish dancers & bagpipe players strewn across Canada!), but on the other hand, leaving home often stops the development and turns it into a historic artifact to be polished over and over. Nevertheless this is a truly great album of traditional love songs.

KAILASH KHER
YATRA (NOMADIC SOULS) (Cumbancha CD14)

I saw this Indian woman singer called Sona Mohapatra on WorldLink TV and went to my local Bollywood emporium to buy her disc and they had never heard of her. They have thousands of CDs and DVDs for sale but it is all related to the filmi culture, either Bolly, Lolly or Tollywood. Now here's another Indian singer who is not primarily a playback artist, though he was picked by A.R. Rahman as a vocalist for the "soul" in his voice. Kailash Kher and his band Kailasa are big stars in South Asia and Cumbancha has done us the immense favour of assembling a sampler from their repertoire to get us thoroughly hooked on this singer. Oh, Kher is also a judge on "Indian Idol" -- I know I don't have to explain that to you, but let's assume they are not as ludicrous as their American counterparts. Kher comes from a folkie background (his dad was a Hindu priest who often sang folk songs), but after moving to Mumbai and singing jingles, Kher teamed up with two brothers who were the heart of a rock band called Bombay Black for a more energetic musical offering. They topped the charts with their first and second albums released in 2006 and 2007. They've remade a couple of their hits for this Cumbancha album and do other songs in unplugged versions, which means you can hear the tablas & harmonium. And in the acoustic numbers Kher's soulful voice is evident, as on the remake of "Teri Deewani" which evokes comparisons with the ne plus ultra, Nusrat. Unlike in the west where you can squeak by with a cute sample or a tricky video, in the Indian market you have to deliver & this disc is packed with brilliance.

PUTUMAYO PRESENTS INDIA (PUT 288-2)

This is a very pleasant set of contemporary Indian music. It's neither filmi not religious though it does include three songs from soundtrack albums and a couple of quasi-religious pieces. It steers a middle course so is mellow, verging on easy listening, but sometimes that's just the ticket. I saw a couple of music videos by Sona Mohapatra and thought she would start showing up on compilations like this but she is not here, however there are some old favourites like Susheela Raman and Deepak Ram, and relative newcomer Kiran Ahluwalia turns up too. Unlike Western pop stars, Indian vocalists are actually good singers, some of them really exceptional, like Swati Natekar, a traditional ghazal singer who graces Niraj Chag's song "Khwaab." Kailash Kher, a fine-voiced playback singer, fronts "Naino Sey," which is by session guitarist Sanjay Divecha. Tunes roll gently by with a dreamlike murmur, like wind or rain when you are half asleep. A.R. Rahman shows up with his hit "Tere Bina" from the film GURU. It's interesting that an outsider, like Cheb i Sabbah, gives a more telling portrait of India with his DEVOTION album than any recent anthology. The music is corny, schmaltzy even, and the devotional stuff gets a little shrill, but this Putumayo sampler weaves a pleasant flower-strewn path through contemporary sounds from the great subcontinent.

RAVI SHANKAR
VINTAGE 78 RPM RECORDS (Saregama)

When I listen to Ravi Shankar I picture Shiva, the many-armed Hindu God, playing. I wonder if this visual effect was created by altered consciousness (drugs or starvation) when the original artist saw the blur of quickly moving arms of a dancer but their brain registered the trail as many arms. The same thought occurred to me on viewing Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" in Philadelphia, which was painted some years after Edweard Muybridge's stop-motion photographs. However the impression on listening to Shankar is of someone with superhuman agility in their fingers and the sense that there is more than one pair of hands at work, not just the sympathetic resonating strings. It seems like a lead, rhythm and bass all going simultaneously on one instrument (Well, there is the tampura but you don't usually hear it). It's mind-altering but not in the corny psychedelic way usually associated with Shankar as father of world music, inspirer of George Harrison and everyone else from Brian Jones to Traffic to the other British bands who tried on pop sitar licks. The open-string strum that introduces many pieces is like a door to a part of your brain that is all endorphin without strenuous exercise or excitement. That part of your body that creates its own pleasurable morphine, somewhere like the pituitary gland or the hypothalamus (I think of the hypothalamus as grunting contentedly in the mud at the bottom of a lake). You might argue that it's the monotony: that the droning quality of the half-hour long ragas induces a sense of stupor, but this disc proves the opposite. Yes, it's great to bask in a long dream-like raga that is attuned to the time of day but here we are confronted with the fact that Shankar's career predates the long-playing record by decades. Saregama has assembled 18 3-minute tracks that were issued as sides of 78 rpm shellac discs between 1948 and 1956. It is phenomenal. Shankar knew that he (& long-time accompanist Pandit Chaturlal on tablas) had to take it to the top, hit it and quit, all the while with an eye on the egg timer. Ali Akbar Khan pops in with his sarod on a couple of numbers. But it doesn't seem strained, forced, truncated, or frantic. In fact it sounds as relaxed as his longer albums that contain only two or three tracks. Here is the genius at work. I argue that this disc is as great as any piece of classical music produced in the twentieth century, even though it is an agglomeration of disparate pieces. It holds together as much as any suite by Debussy, Webern, Ellington or anyone you care to name. The Duchess bought it, seduced by the package, which promises more than it contains. In fact it is just a CD in a huge cardboard box with a fake record grommeted to the front and a lot of air inside. But as Horace has it, there is an air of hidden riches, and it is in the music. Now I am tempted to get the First LP Record also put out in a fancy package by Saregama. If it is anything like this, I will be playing it in heavy rotation for a long time to come.

THE GYUTO MONKS TANTRIC CHOIR
TIBETAN CHANTS FOR WORLD PEACE (White Swan WS0086)

There is some music that is satisfying but you only need to hear it once, or every decade or so. It stays in your mind so you can "hear" it without putting on the disc. The gravelly throaty sound of the Tibetan monks is one of those (& is akin to didjeridoo or Tuvan throat singing). In fact this disc sounds a lot like the Tibetan chant album that came out on Folkways (I think) in the 60s, but still I enjoyed it and have listened to it a few times. Let me explain. There is also music you put on to send people home when the party's over but they are too inebriated to get the hint. Or when the neighbours are making a din. The Duchess has obnoxious neighbours who listen to crappy music. I don't know what it is, maybe white rap music, but all you can hear is the rhythm track which sounds like the boom-chaka button on an Electrovox or Hohner organ from the 60s. So call in the monks & crank it up, dude. Indeed this is not relaxing music that your masseuse would put on to lull you, it's Looking into the pit of Hell stuff. Zen is mentally engaging, so I like Buddhism, though I think all religion is superstition, & as Emile Zola said "Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Tibetan Buddhism is the Catholicism of Eastern religion, full of ritual and ceremony, though the Dali Lama is a lot hipper than that stiff in the Vatican. And you have to sympathize with their situation. I don't know how this is going to effect world peace but anything is worth a shot. The monks on here were multi-tracked by Mickey Hart to fatten the sound. They play bells and there's a drum or two and some really dull cymbals which they seem to keep dropping and which roll about in a big empty hall. Every now and then the monks stop their chants and you hear the cymbal wallah picking up the dozens of scattered cymbals, dropping them as he does (because he is bowing and walking backwards), and leaving the room (that's what I picture). It's also cold up there in Dharamsala so I imagine you can see their breath. The music paints a great picture, so let it take you on a little trip.

DEBASHISH BHATTACHARYA
CALCUTTA CHRONICLES: INDIAN SLIDE GUITAR ODYSSEY (Riverboat TUGCD1049)

This is the second Riverboat release for Bhattacharya, a Bengali slide guitar player who has earned the sobriquet "Pandit". His 2007 album won a BBC Radio Three Award for World Music. While this doesn't progress beyond the first one musically, it is a great mood setter. It's just slide guitar and tablas, performing a set of ragas which you soon forget are guitar-driven. Not that is sounds like a sitar, but Bhattacharya added sympathetic resonating strings to his three home-made guitars and it enhances the sound considerably. It's nothing like Hawaiian slack-key from which it sprang: the mood he creates is very much the out-of-mind trance-inducing flow which I find helps me work. Bhattacharya has taken some old tunes from a wide range of sources, including Rajasthani gypsy and Sufi repertoires and a variety of string instruments and trips out. His brother, it looks like, is the accomplished tabla player. There are nine cuts about 7 minutes long each and they flow together into a great musical tide to lift your spirits.

CHEB I SABBAH
DEVOTION (Six Degrees bar code 657036 1142-2)

When I got back from India I was craving two things: a steak and a glass of California red wine. Afterwards I didn't feel so good: my stomach was not up to the sudden influx of rich fatty food and while I believe we should eat cows, not worship them, I know I would be healthier if I abstained. I also did not want to hear any more Indian music for a while, but there was an advance copy of Cheb i Sabbah's new disc DEVOTION waiting for me and I immediately put it on. Of course the first thought is to compare it to Gaudi's recent DUB QAWWALI remix of Nusrat, but that is unfair. Nusrat is unparalleled in the history of recorded music and Gaudi created a traditional dub album to accompany his Sufi devotional singing. Chebiji does include Sufi music on here but the main sound is Hindi. The sexagenarian Algerian Sabbah made recordings in India of Hindu religious singing and added layers of sound in his urbane way. This is his seventh album and Cheb i really has become the master mixologist & orchestrator. As a result, DEVOTION is stunning.

Cheb i Sabbah used to be a concert promoter (he booked Nusrat's first American tour, brought Khaled, Cheba Zahouania, a wild sold-out show of Khaled & Hakim, etc) and deejay (KPFA radio & Nikki's BBQ, a club on Haight Street in SF), though he was a cut above and would often synch a North African drumming track with a West African song to give it more oomph, so it was inevitable he would start making his own albums from scratch. I got to know him when we worked together at Round World Music in the 90s but I may have encountered him in the 60s, because he was part of the legendary Living Theater company of Julian Beck. I remember in 1968 they staged Frankenstein at the Roundhouse in London and I was terrified when they started dragging people out of the audience to be included in some weird experiment that was happening on stage. Theatre is in his blood but Cheb i Sabbah has successfully found a niche combining electronica with folk music that appeals to a wide spectrum of listeners. The top song in India this year (according to a Desi poll) was "Dhoom machaday dhoom," an awful piece of filmi pap, sung in English. I think the Indians are ready for an Algerian to re-educate them about what's good about their music.

Like its predecessors, SHRI DURGA and MAHA MAYA, DEVOTION sets a mood and with trancelike insistence takes you on a little musical journey for an hour. Yes, he hits the tourist spots of Goa and Mumbai, but Chebiji also plunges into the madness of the Kumbh Mela in Allahbad with 70 million other devotees, disguised as a naked sadhu. Nusrat appears, in spirit, on "Kinna sonna," sung by Master Saleem and "Qalanderi" sung by Pakistani Riffat Sultana, which goes out with a hint of "Chole ki peeche." Crumbling dub of the first order comes riding in on monster bass on "Haun vaari haun varaney." At ten minutes long it seems incessant, and with loads of reverb and mystery it has what can only be described as an opiated aura. There's a fake-out ending and "slight return." The album builds in strength till the spiritual transcendence of "Aaye Bhairav Bholsanath," and its mantra-like lyrics sung by Anoop Jalota. After this we drop down to Varanasi for a little ritual cleansing: some temple bells, ambient sounds and a bit of decompression from our aural trip to Mother India. Not something you would relax to and probably only endure if you were in a Hindu temple with the incense & accompanying visual stimulation, but in the context of DEVOTION it is the perfect coda.

BISMILLAH KHAN
THE SHENNAI'S HUMBLE MASTER (Saregama CDNFC150712-3)

Prepare yourself for a musical odyssey. This double-CD set is part of a new venture from Saregama, called "Introducing the Masters." On this outing they introduce the greatest performer on the Indian oboe, the shennai, a plaintive moody reed instrument that alternates between an angry mosquito and a lover's wail. At that fateful midnight hour in 1947 when the British flag was lowered for the last time & Gandhi-ji's spinning wheel flag was raised over the Red Fort in Delhi, it was Khan's musical voice that declared independence. He had brought the humble instruments from the folk realm of weddings and temples to Indian classical music. Fittingly, he performs ragas on the first disc with tabla accompaniment. But neophytes should start with disc two, the songs from films that he played. They are entirely entrancing, each song twenty to thirty minutes long, but accompanied by violin or the susurration of insects in the night air.

JNAN PRAKASH GHOSH
DRUMS OF INDIA (Saregama CDNFD150708-9)

This reissue pairs two drum albums from 1968 and 1979. 1968, you will recall was a big year for stereo sound and so record labels were eager to show off the separation of two musical channels so listeners could get "inside" the music. The engineers were more concerned with the success of the sound so the musicians actually had free rein to play anything they liked. The result is a really great set of drumming. The second disc is more of the same and that's it. I thought perhaps they were aiming at a modern clientele who would want to sample the tracks for reuse in experimental music, but actually the discs work well, though mainly as background music. The kind of thing you put on when you want to read or create art and don't want to be distracted by blinding guitar solos and singing. Not to say the music is not worth listening to as an aural experience. It explains many different styles of Indian music, and on that account is useful as an educational tool. Best of all it will not damage your monaural equipment.

GAUDI + NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN
DUB QAWWALI (Six Degrees 657036 1137-2)

Posthumous collaborations are generally weird. Remember the attempts to make Bob Marley sound like a dancehall artist by adding syndrums to his final demo tapes? Or how about Natalie Cole singing along with the great Nat? Lisa Marie Presley and her very dead dad? Spare us. But Nusrat is different. First of all he embraced the young musicians who wanted to sample his voice &, other than embarrassment at Eddie Vedder's use of his vocals in "Dead man walking," he was generally cool with the concept. Bally Sagoo did a whole album of Nusrat remixes called MAGIC TOUCH that was pretty worthless. It had elements of jazz, vaudeville, tv theme music, but no semblance of anything familiar to Nusrat, like instruments from the Indian subcontinent. A breakthrough moment came with Massive Attack's remix of "Musst Musst" on the RealWorld album of that name which became a club favourite. Now a London-based, Italian mix-artist called Gaudi has done a whole album of Nusrat and done him proud. Nusrat has a phonemenal voice, certainly up there with Enrico Caruso and John McCormack as one of the greatest tenors of the era of recorded music. You can count on him to always be in tune; no matter how far out he goes, he has the key in his pocket. That's a plus. Gaudi has added a reggae feel to most of the ten tracks and plays the bass himself, in a fine rootical Flabba-Holt style.

The secret ingredient here is the other genius on the set, this time a living one: Style Scott, drummer for the Roots Radics, Creation Rebel, and founder of Dub Syndicate. He worked with Adrian Sherwood at On-U Sound in London when he came on tour with Prince Far I in the 70s.

Now on the tenth anniversary of Nusrat's death, Gaudi has taken on the master of Sufi spiritualism, which is not too far from the "peace, love & unity" message of reggae. There is such solidity and consistency to this set you would swear the tunes had been written with Nusrat actively collaborating, but the answer is Gaudi's method: he was approached by Nusrat's label, Rehmat Gramophone, and asked if he might like to remix a cut for an album they were planning for the tenth anniversary of Nusrat's death. The label was so pleased with the result they offered Gaudi unreleased tapes from the 70s. He spent a year listening to them, understanding the melodic structures and presumably thinking of where he could drop in some thundering dub in counterpoint to a slow passage, or coast out on a Stepper rhythm. Then he carefully removed most of the harmonium and handclaps from the original and started laying in synth, bass and drums. Style Scott was recorded at Channel One in Jamaica. There's a real string section and, as an added bonus, there are a few Asian instruments -- tabla, sarang, bamboo flute -- added to keep it rooted in the Sufi camp. "Dil da rog muka ja mahi" has a weird little synth riff from Kraftwerk, but it works, maybe because it too dates from the 70s when Nusrat was still unknown outside Pakistan. Indeed the overall warm sound of this album can be traced back forty years, because Gaudi used Hammond organ, Moog synthesizer, Fender Rhodes, and analog equipment including tape-loop reverb & echo units, tube amps, etc, that recall the sound of King Tubby, Lee Perry and other dub pioneers. This is Gaudi's twelfth album and Nusrat's 151st. It's stellar.

MAHWASH
GHAZALS AFGHANS (Accords Croisés AC118)

Subtitled "Secular and sacred poems of love," this is a delightful collection of classical music from Afghanistan. Of course the recent tragic history of that country is well-known to everyone. The Taliban are like moles: the more you whack 'em the quicker they pop up elsewhere. Mahwash, who rose to fame with the Radio Kabul Ensemble in the 1960s, quit her homeland for California. She was awarded the title of Ustad (Master) in 1997. The ghazal is a sung Sufi love poem: the sublime expression of Indo-Muslim culture, where Persian poetry meets the music of South Asia. The vocabulary is highly symbolic and relates either to Divine love (Haqiqi) or Human love (Majazi). But it is also ambiguous, there is no gender specified as the terms slip from sacred to profane and back again, and the lover could be either god or a human in many of the songs, which are delivered in metaphors of the "moth and the flame" variety. Musically you hear the oriental Maqam structure as it merges with the Raga form. As Afghanistan is bordered by Iran on the one hand (and uses Persian rather than Urdu lyrics) and Pakistan on the other (from where it borrows musical instruments), it is the perfect meeting place for the two cultures. Like her previous album RADIO KABOUL, this CD comes in a handsome case-bound package with a full-colour bilingual booklet bound in. The musicians include Ghalil Gudaz who plays sitar, harmonium, lute, sarod and rubab, and does the arrangements, and two Franco-Indians: Edouard Prabhu on tablas, and Henri Tournier on deep bansuri flute.

FAIZ ALI FAIZ
L'AMOUR DE TOI ME FAIT DANSER ( Accords Croises AC106)

I was at a party in Berkeley recently -- some genteel folks sitting around talking poetry and art while eating and drinking. As there was a piano I started playing (just bachground stuff: Satie, Chopin, Yellen-Ager, fake Debussy). When I took a break to eat, the host, to encourage me, put on "Music Minus One" an old jazz album arranged by Herbie Nichols that had all the parts except the piano. I wasn't tempted, or drunk enough, to jump in. You can create a framework for great music and allow it to happen but there has to be more spirit than competence for sparks to fly. When an artist dies their music rarely goes on without them. Witness the staggering stumbling fall of bands like the Stones or the Who who persisted, blundering on into inanity, despite losing key members. Franco had a 30-piece band and when you see videos of TPOK Jazz in concert a lot happens without him doing much, but when he died the sound expired with him. When Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died his anointed successor had already been primed to step into the oversize slippers. The Qawwali sound rolls on with the chosen one, Faiz Ali Faiz, who faces his toughest challenge: a whole set of songs associated with Nusrat. The result is amazing. The music has not changed but Faiz assumes control with real authority. Most songs come from the traditional repertoire of Sufi poetry where a phrase or even one word is repeated over and over as intoxication takes over. Some songs last all night. The longest cut on here is the sing-along "Ali Mullah" which lasts for 25 minutes of blissed trance. The title is actually "Haq Ali" which means "Ali's truth" and refers to the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad who was assassinated for his radical beliefs. Nusrat's great cross-over hit "Musst musst qalander" also used this text. Faiz A. Faiz (another BBC Radio 3 World Music nominee this year) doesn't try the falsetto shriek with which Nusrat could shatter glass, but he does get out there in the stratosphere. It's captured live, which adds to the immediacy.

When I worked at Round World Music in San Francisco in the early 90s, people would ask, "What's a good Nusrat album?" And I would tell them: "Live in Islamabad, volume 103." They thought I was kidding, especially when I told them we didn't stock it, because you could go round the corner to an Indian grocery store and buy it on cassette for $4. Any live Nusrat is good, if the selection includes "Allah Hoo," it's great. There are of course other Sufi singers, other Qawwali bands, but this offering from Faiz Ali Faiz goes straight to the heart.

KOHINOOR LANGA GROUP
MUSIC FROM THE DESERT NOMADS (World Network 58.396)

You know how music can get under your skin. Well for the last two years, since we got back from Rajasthan, the Duchess has been playing this CD ritually every Saturday morning. Though it's music from the Thar desert, there's a shot of Lake Pichola on the cover and the view of the hotel across the water we could see from our hotel room in Udaipur. That hotel was lit up every night by bright flood lights (& reflected in the lake under the full moon) and one day we went over there to discover they were filming a Bollywood musical. We asked if we could look around and they said sure, so we walked about among the cameras and cables and hoped that someone would ask us to be in a scene. We haven't seen the film yet, if it was released. It's called BEVERDAS and is a parody of our favourite film DEVDAS. But this is not Bollywood music. It's tribal music with glittery singing from a young lad and some great playing on scratchy fiddles and bleating reeds. The group's name -- Kohinoor -- of course recalls the famous diamond, now in the Tower of London, but once the property of some Maharajah. There are thousands of musical families in Rajasthan. Many of them migrated across the desert from (what is now) Pakistan centuries ago and along the way changed their religion from Hindu to Muslim (about the 17th century during the reign of Aurangzeb). Like Mali where you also have musical castes, the Rajasthani & Pakistani musicians belong to one family and usually have the surname Khan. They play for wealthy people but of course will always show up at a wedding or party to entertain and partake in the festivities. And the shortage of wealthy patrons means they have a hard life between galas. Their music can be located between the classical tradition of Northern India and folk music but doesn't adhere to any strict raga formats. The instruments are small and portable. The leader Kohinoor Khan sings and plays khartal -- musical woods, which he clacks like castanets. Safi Mohamed plays jaws harp and the 28-stringed sindhi sarangi. Mohamed Rafik sings and plays harmonium. Lukman Khan plays the dholak (double headed drum). 12-year-old Sikhander Khan is the "silver-voiced" singer, while the youngest brother 9-year-old Salim Khan plays castanets and dances. The youthful singer is needed because the songs are mainly written from a woman's point of view (Don't ask me why they wont allow women to be part of the band, ask the mullahs). In July 1994 the Kohinoor Langa group were invited to Germany for a folk festival. They recorded in the state-of-the-art studios of Radio Cologne and then were captured in concert a few days later to augment the album. It's sublime.

INDE -- RAJASTHAN
MUSICIENS PROFESSIONNELS POPULAIRES (OCORA C 580044)

You can't enough of a good thing, and this OCORA album is a great supplement to World Network's MUSIC FROM THE DESERT NOMADS. It has the usual detailed OCORA package booklet with photos and song lyrics in translation. The Langas are on here and so are five other musical families: the Manghaniyar, the Jogi, the Dholi, the Nagarshi, and the Bhopa. There's a wide array of traditional Rajasthani music with flutes, clarinets, lutes, oboes, sitars, viols, etc. The recordings were made in 1972, 1978, and 1993 and they were previously released on LP (OCR81) but the CD adds an additional 24 minutes. The Langas get the lion's share (or tiger's share, since this is India), opening the disc with a haunting double murali (clarinet) solo. (The liner notes tell us the instrument resembles a pungi but to my ears it sounds like a bagpipe.) It is accompanied by sarangi (fiddle). The Mangyanihar come from the region around Jaisalmer and are not as socially well-placed as the Langas. They don't have noble patrons so play for just about anyone, thus their standing in the community is more ambiguous and they are less esteemed. Outstanding is the excerpt from the epic ballad "Amar Singh" (about a devoted wife's suttee) played on the sarangi fiddle and sung by two Jogi. If you liked "Native son" by Velvet Underground, this is for you! (I am beginning to think John Cale actually knew what he was doing after all.) The bhapang or gut-bucket solo by Jahur Khan is also a must-hear. It's a one-stringed instrument with a gourd resonator under the musician's armpit; he squeezes it while plucking to get glissandi. It sounds like a cross between a berimbau and a talking drum. Another instrument, the satara (double flute) reminds me of gasba, the North African woodwind, and there are doubtless connections here. This is a great album for armchair explorers.

DEBASHISH BHATTACHARYA
CALCUTTA SLIDE GUITAR (Riverboat UK: TUG CD1036)

Debashish Battacharya was trained as a vocalist but early on was attracted to the slide guitar. The Indians play lap-steel or Hawaiian guitar and of course use different tuning from Western guitar. The Hawaiian style arrived in Calcutta in 1929 when Tau Moe, a celebrated slack key player from Honolulu performed. I heard some sad slack key guitar in Udaipur and it's good to know there's someone out there doing something creative with this instrument. Debashish goes into raga mode and echoes the classical Indian instruments like the veena, sarod and the sitar in the way he bends notes and creates runs on his multi-stringed instruments. He has actually built three guitars, of different sizes, with more than six strings apiece (one has 22 strings) for performing, and uses all of them on this CD. He added resonating or drone strings to the neck to add sympathetic vibrations, like on a sitar. He has been playing since he was 4, and performing since he was 6. Now in his 40s he is joined by his siblings on tabla and tanpura and the trio create a mellow journey that is very reminiscent of classical Indian raga, but with the more familiar tones of the slide guitar instead of sitar. One criticism might be that it occasionally sounds like endless tuning up, but if you go with the flow it arrives at some transcendental passages as Debashish swoops up and down the neck. Good for meditation or a respite from the Reggaeton!

KIRAN AHLUWALIA (Triloka TRI-CD 82055)

Here is a collection of contemporary ghazals that transcends boundaries. Kiran Ahluwalia is an Indian vocalist who grew up in Canada, but like many expatriates has guarded her musical heritage closely in her heart. She has assembled a great group of classical musicians and written melodies to accompany some lovely poetry. She also sprinkles her set with Punjabi folk songs. There is the suggestion of a synthesizer drone behind the opening track which gives it an unwelcome New Age flavour: the harmonium would have been enough. Kiran plays tanpura to back her singing, and it's really great to hear someone singing Indian love songs with a fine voice who is not Lata or Asha! But still you start seeing movies in your head when you hear this, it's unavoidable and she even quotes a few famous filmi riffs in her melodies (I cant name it, but I've seen the movie with the "Jhanjra" melody in it). The Beatles were famous for borrowing Indian sounds for their music, so here's a tit-for-tat: the guitarist quotes (perhaps unconsciously) "Something in the way she moves" in "Yeh Nahin"!

Kiran's parents were pretty upset when she quit her stock-trading job in Toronto and went back to India to study music! She studied with Vital Rao, a 70-year-old performer who entered the household of the King of Hyderabad as a lad! Rao taught her the thousand-year-old tradition of Persian ghazals (which came to Indian with the Mughals in the 14th century) and she has mastered many of the forms and gone on to compose her own versions. To bring the ancient tradition to young audiences she explains that the ghazal is "just a highly literate pick-up line." She has been fortunate in finding expatriate Punjabi poets in Toronto who are also immersed in their folk traditions and have been writing poetry in this form, which she now sets to music and sings beautifully. Because Punjabi folk music also produced Bhangra we cannot expect Kiran to put us to sleep, and she does kick out the jams for "Meri gori gori," a rousing song about yellow bangles.

CAFE BOMBAY
Chai, Chappattis, Richshaws & Gurus (Metro CD101)

Okay, make yourself a cup of chai and get ready to start your musical day. This CAFE BOMBAY CD has really got under my skin and I have played it a lot in the last two months. The sequence and selection was done by a Scotsman formerly associated with Triple Earth Records, Iain Scott, and he has done a superb job, making this CD a joy to play over and over. It starts quietly and contemplatively and then gradually builds to a crescendo in the middle and then falls away again, like a busy day in Bombay (I imagine).

CAFE BOMBAY is simply the best Indian sampler to come along yet. It's set up as a day in the life of a dreamer who works in a café in Bombay. He hears various things from traditional flute and sitar to the film music of A.R. Rahman to grinding dance tracks, and the whole thing has a pleasant day-dream quality to it. The collection only has a couple of familiar tracks and basically charts new territory, unlike the scads of second-rate Bhangra compilations which all start to sound the same after a while. The packaging is very handsome and makes me keen to check out the other discs in the Cafe series. Though the cover says it contains "track by track commentary," these notes are like prose poems, discussing the comings-and-goings in the imaginary cafe. The selections might send you off looking for the original albums they came from, but then again sometimes the best track is all you need, and in this regard this is a collection of first rate tunes culled from a wide variety of sources. "Yaro Yarodi," sung by three singers and written by Rahman, is very familiar, it may just be I am starting to recognise Rahman riffs, or I could have seen the film and forgotten the title since I don't speak Hindi. One good filmi tune begets another so we hear Lata Mangeshkar next: she's the old doll with the incredibly high voice that you either love or hate. There's a great rhythm that sustains this piece but it is followed by the Mother of all Grooves, Sukhwinder Singh's "Ghar Aaja", six minutes of head-banging bliss. Turn it up till the bass makes your crockery fall off the shelf! The song was from his 2000 album NASHI HAI NASHI HI. Tablas on reverb, tons of echo on the wailing vocals. I don't think it was in a film, but the movie in your head is often enough.

INDIA
THE GREATEST SONGS EVER (Time-Life/Petrol 060)

I thought this really had to be truly preposterous: a CD of 11 tracks, less than an hour long, claiming to be the "Greatest Songs Ever" from India. The playlist starts in the UK with a jamming bhangra cut from Saqi called "Sir Duke Da," and follows up with Pakistani great Nusrat doing his thing with remix by Partners in Rhyme (uncredited, but well-known from the "Bend it like Beckham" soundtrack), followed by the achingly beautiful "Ek Ladki Ko Dekha" by R.D. Burman sung by Kumar Sanu from the Hindi film "1942 Love Story." By track five, when we arrive at the first of two songs from Lata Mangeshkar, I no longer think it's such a pretentious claim. Not quite at the level of CAFE BOMBAY this CD is nevertheless a worthwhile and listenable set of contemporary Indian pop with a couple of Bhangra gems. Lata Mangeshkar's shrill tones may be hard for some listeners to take for extended periods, so her two appearances on here are interspersed with instrumentals. Table Beat Science is hardly Indian. I like Zakir Hussain's playing, while Karsh Kale does little for me, but it works in the flow and leads into a mellow groove from Lucky Ali. The dance flows on with Mantra Mix by Makyo, unfamiliar to me, but reminiscent of the early work of Cheb i Sabbah. Then the mood stops dead as we get another shot of Lata from an early soundtrack: shrill and low-fi, but not bad if you are into her work. It's not credited but a web search shows the source as the 1967 film "Jewel Thief," and more likely another Lata compilation called "The Greatest Film Songs." This is followed by Trilok Gurtu, sounding at first like Mahavishnu Orchestra (remember them?). The album goes out quietly with a moody Santoor peice by Shivkumar Sharma accompanied by Hariprasad Chaurasia on flute. There are recipes instead of liner notes: maybe that's what you need while listening to this album, though it does suggest ambient cafe listening rather than something for serious Indian music fans.

RADIO INDIA
THE ETERNAL DREAM OF SOUND (Sublime Frequencies SF014)

This is a huge disappointment: a double album culled from random tapes of Indian radio made a decade apart by two brothers from Seattle. The lack of track identification is aggravating and the randomness becomes irritating. There's a striving for effect that is tiresome: the sounds of a radio being tuned, high frequency whistles, static and endless audio distortion which may be cute for a few seconds but not for the length of a whole cut. I have several hours of African radio recorded 20 years ago which make an interesting mosaic, complete with ads for Singer sewing machines ("Bring her to Sing-her!"), insect repellant (DOOM for dudus!) and ASPRO, but I wouldn't consider trying to profit by exploiting them commercially. The jump cuts are annoying, the static becomes unlistenable, but the most troublesome thing about RADIO INDIA is the lack of licensing: you simply cannot take chunks of Lata Mangeshkar and other identifiable artists and recycle them hoping that Universal music and its lawyers will not care. Never mind. This one will be withdrawn as soon as someone notices. It's amateur in the worst sense.

DEEPAK RAM
SEARCHING FOR SATYAM (MELT2000)

For something completely different, check out SEARCHING FOR SATYAM by Deepak Ram. He's a flute player from India and this is a mellow jazz album. Now don't get me wrong: I wouldn't steer you towards "easy listening" or "dinner jazz." This is one of those quietly meditative albums you need to clear the air late at night. Actually Ram is from South Africa and first visited India when he was 17 and studied with a master flautist. He also inherited a collection of flutes from a famous Indian flute maker. The accompaniment is tabla, guitar, drums and double bass. It surprised me because I expected it to be New Age but it's better than that, in fact for jazz buffs as well as fans of South Asian music this is a keeper.

MUSAFIR
DHOLA MARU (Sounds True M114D 1999)

Cold rainy weather always makes me start dreaming of warm climates, so lately I've been thinking about Rajasthan. Short of a plane ticket, buying some Rajasthani music is a quick trip to the heat and mystery of the ancient kingdom situated in the Thar desert in Northwest India where thousands flock at this time of year for the camel markets and races.

Musafir has a new CD called DHOLA MARU on the Sounds True label. Unusual among Rajasthani groups, Musafir's members come from different ethnic backgrounds, from Muslim and gypsy castes, and bring their diverse heritages to the fusion. The album starts with "Rangi Rang" a long qawwali invocation in the tradition of Sufi mystics like the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. (Several of Musafir's members have the surname Khan: a Muslim name that musicians adopted centuries ago, even if they weren't Muslims.) Most of the tracks are long meditative pieces with harmonium or flute and percussion and vocals.

"Dhola Maru," based on the famous poem "Lela Majnoun" (the "Romeo and Juliet" of the Arab world) is one of Rajasthan's greatest love songs and is presented in a Manghaniyar style, with warbly vocals to match the squirrely quality of the harmonium. The tabla also goes nuts on this track which builds to a fantastic soaring pitch. You only wish you could see the whirling dancers that usually perform with such music.

The album closes with another rocker, "Roomal (The Hanky)," definitely one for the San Francisco club scene. It's a fast knee-dance piece performed by a man, with what sounds like Breton bagpipes. The story concerns a maharajah who has been stood up at the altar on his wedding day, so one of his friends dresses as a woman and the wedding goes on!

"Musafir" means travel or pilgrimage and this album transports you with a mystical magic tour of trance and dance, improvisation, tempo shifts and virtuoso soloists.

NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN
ECSTASY (Music Club 50156)

After listening to the ROUGH GUIDE TO SUFI MUSIC I was ready for more Sufi music and put on a recent Nusrat compilation drawn from three of his many releases: ECSTASY. I knew ECSTASY would be good because it opens with "Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu." Like Thelonious Monk, Nusrat had some favored compositions in his repertoire that he would play at nearly every gig. "Allah Hu" is his "Epistrophy." That track is drawn from "Live at Washington University volume 37" -- so it must have been an extremely long night! The music is structured like an Indian raga; as it progresses, Nusrat gets further and further out into his scat singing.

The purpose of qawwali is to reduce the distance between the Creator and created, enabling man to realize the meaning of his life on earth. The repetition makes the music accessible to Western ears and helps bring you along on the journey into the mystical trance state.

The liner notes and sequencing are top-class: they're the work of Jameela Siddiqi, host of "Songs of the Sufi Mystics" on the BBC and author of The Feast of Nine Virgins, a thriller based on Indian classical music. She includes a rare recording of an eighteenth-century song by Baba Bulhe Shah, whose work she says is particularly close to Nusrat as it was first popularized by his musical ancestors. The song is about leaving earthly distractions behind and following an ascetic into the wilderness -- becoming a Yogi bare I guess.

Traditionally qawwali concerts ended with a "Rang" -- a song celebrating a pupil's acceptance by his master -- but, says Siddiqi, a more upbeat ending is often provided by Punjabi folk music. Thus the set concludes with a love song about being reunited with your lover, a metaphor apparently for the disciple finally meeting the master. This is blessed music indeed.

NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & PARTY
DUST TO GOLD (RealWorld)
MUSST MUSST (RealWorld 7862212 1990)

The Sufi poet, Rumi, whose poems were often the basis for Nusrat's improvisation, wrote "Music is no longer an aim, but a vehicle. Song is no longer an end, but a transportation, a path to the divine." Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born the day after Pakistan attained Independence from Britain in 1947 and died fifty years later, in 1997. A Sufi, his devotional singing could affect non-believers with its power. By 1990 he was well-recognised in the West as one of the twentieth century's greatest voices. He also lent his talents when Peter Gabriel asked to sample him for the PASSION soundtrack, or when young Bhangra artists in Britain used his vocals as loops in their popular hits. His "party" were relatives who sang backup and accompanied him with handclaps and a harmonium as he improvised verses in the mode known as Qawwali. He was the supreme exponent of the form and transported audiences with his divine gift. I was fortunate to hear him in person twice. He made some unusual career choices that led to odd hybrids, but the smash hit "Musst Musst," produced by Massive Attack, broadened his fan base to include hip youth. Occasionally, though, his pop producers buried his vocals in a wall of wahwah. Now RealWorld has released four tracks in the traditional acapella mode, recorded back home in Lahore. "Dust to Gold" is a wonderful memento of this great musical legacy. Each track builds slowly with the harmonium and then vocal exercises, like scales, as the chorus warms and soon Nusrat's voice soars, taking us on a trip into the realms of the spirit.

LIVE CONCERTS

NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & PARTY
IN CONCERT at the Scottish Rite Temple, Oakland, 6 June 1992

Nusrat's first North American tour came about after his successfully appearance at WOMAD in England and the release of his MUSST MUSST album from Peter Gabriel's RealWorld label, featuring a deadly remix of the title cut by Massive Attack, in 1990. The tickets were pricey: starting at $35, they went up to an astronomical $200 for sponsor circle seats. I was trying to figure out how to come up with the funds to buy a ticket when I got a call from Cheb I Sabbah, the deejay and promoter. How would you like to be an usher for the Nusrat show? he asked. You'll get in free that way. -- You bet, I replied. All I had to do was wear a white shirt, black tie, black pants and black shoes. I got to the event early with some of my fellow ushers (deejays and music buddies). We took tickets and showed people to their seats: simple. There was a hush as the lights went down. We all lined up expectantly at the back of the room. Cheb I Sabbah appeared and pushed us toward the front, Quick, he said, take those front row seats! No one had bought the $200 tickets and he didn't want it to look like a failure on his part, so suddenly we were promoted from "ushers" to "sponsors". (Needless to add we were the only non-Asians present.) From the moment Nusrat appeared the place went nuts. I didn't know that simple music -- harmonium and voice with handclaps -- could generate such fervour. Everyone was dressed in their finery right down to shoes that curl up at the toe, like some kind of Arabian Nights fantasy. A succession of large men in blue gowns danced onto the stage to shower handfuls of dollar bills over the heads of the band. It was intoxicating. They did "Allah Hoo" and all my favourites. We sang along to "Musst Musst" hearing the dub in our heads, blessed to be present.

RAVI SHANKAR
IN CONCERT Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Berkeley 19 September 2003

Forget Manu Chao, forget Salif Keita. At 83, the single most recognizable world music artist is a modest soft-spoken genius with a twinkle in his eye and magic in his fingers. His life has been spent in music. In 1930 at the age of ten he went on a world tour with his brother's dance troupe. There is a Pathé Marconi newsreel that shows what was then truly exotic music and dance hitting Paris. The young Ravi with a shock of black hair is about half the size of his sitar. They lived near Segovia and the virtuoso guitarist dandled the youngster on his lap. The troupe next took America by storm and in Hollywood some famous actress (Mabel Normand?) wanted to adopt him. After being exposed to so much at such an early age, young Shankar became an ascetic and withdrew into serious study with his guru, multi-instrumentalist Ustad Allaudin Khan. After years of isolated study he re-emerged and established the National Chamber Orchestra as musical director of All India Radio. He was already in his forties when the Beatles discovered him in the mid-sixties and soon after he embarked on his career as India's ambassador of the sitar, appearing at Monterey Pop and Woodstock. He wrote scores for the Apu trilogy of Satyajit Ray and the Oscar-winning epic GHANDI. He has recorded more than sixty albums, been knighted by the Queen of England, and served six years in India's upper chamber of Parliament. With advancing age he tours less frequently, but continues to teach.

In the last five years his now-22-year-old daughter Anoushka Shankar has emerged as his brightest pupil. She has won many awards and now tours with her father, opening the show and dueting with him. This show at Zellerbach Auditorium was different. While it was a homecoming for Anoushka, who grew up in California, she had injured her wrist and couldn't play. But the show must go on and baba did the honours. With Tanmoy Bose on tabla and two of his students sitting at the back of the stage playing tenor and bass tamboura, he started into an evening raga, his traditional opening number. During the alap he had trouble with his tuning (his sitar had been tuned by Anoushka who sat beside him) and seemed out of sorts. Anoushka fiddled with his bridge and moved the mike away from him when it started feeding back. It didn't bode well, but the second number, translated as "The Ardent Bachelor" turned up the heat and soon Ravi was off in cloud nine, bending and plucking the strings and showing there was no trace of arthritis in his octagenarian hands. Anoushka counted out the beat with her right hand on her knee and, as it was a complex (to Western ears) ten-beat raga (3-2-3-2), this aided my understanding of where the "one" was, which helped me grasp what was going on. At the end of the first hour he said apologetically to the packed house, "If you are still here after the break I'll do something special."

The second half of the show was dubbed "Rangeela Pelau" or "A Colourful Mix" by Shankar who brought out a second tabla player, Arup Chattopadhyay. The two tabla players traded licks to the delight of all while Shankar invented musical ideas and quoted snatches of folk tunes. He forgot that Anoushka wasn't playing to back him up and it was really a thrill to hear him unaccompanied with two exceptional tabla players, each with a unique style, taking turns prodding him onward. In India, he explained, concerts last for hours. He didn't realize we would gladly have sat there all night.