An obvious point of entry when considering the influence of Indian music on Western music has, and continues to be, The Beatles, and George Harrison's friendship with Ravi Shankar. And while there were a ton of songs in the Sixties that had a sitar, rarely did anyone else approach the instrument with the sort of seriousness that Harrison did. But the influence is more than that, and it's one that started much earlier than when the Beatle picked up the sitar. West Meets East: Indian Music And Its Influence On The West, an epic new box-set from Cherry Red, seeks to understand how Indian music shaped Western music, and how Western performers responded to a new set of tones, modalities, and instruments.
The appeal of any box-set is down to the curation of the tracks within, and the heady and enticing mix of the familiar and the new. That said, the curators of this set provided a real education. While it's nice to have John Coltrane numbers here, like the obvious ("India"), and the less expected ("My Favorite Things"), it's nicer still to have those within the vicinity of stuff like "Raag Yaman Kalyan: Teen Tala (Evening Raga)" by Ali Akbar Khan. That epic number appropriately close to a raga from Ravi Shankar, but also nearby is an Ornette Coleman performance. Within close proximity like this, the worlds of jazz and Indian classical music seem closer than ever, with the moments of improvisation, and the scaling of scales seeming to be parallel exercises here and in the Indian sub-continent.
West Meets East: Indian Music And Its Influence On The West finds its way from Yuseef Lateef (the sublime "Love Dance") to the ruminative exotica of Martin Denny ("Moonlight on the Ganges"). Of course there's a difference between appropriating Indian techniques and instrumentation in the West, and simply riffing on it, but the use of Indian styles here is significant, even if it's the cocktail pop of Denny. Elsewhere, there are soundtrack selections from films by Michael Powell and Satyajit Ray, and compositions from Debussy and Bartok. The expanse covered on this set is immense and a listener can come at this from multiple angles. I think that's why this is such an impressively-produced set, as it's sure to please others in different ways than it pleased a listener like me, for example.
West Meets East: Indian Music And Its Influence On The West is out now via Cherry Red.