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Raga Rock (album)
''Raga Rock'' is an album credited to "the Folkswingers featuring Harihar Rao", who was a Los Angeles-based Indian classical musician and ethnomusicologist. The album was released in June 1966 on the World Pacific Records, World Pacific record label. The title refers to the raga rock trend in popular music, as artists such as the Beatles, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds had all begun incorporating Indian influences into their recent work. Led by the sitar playing of Rao, a longtime associate of Ravi Shankar, the album contains instrumental versions of several of these contemporary songs, including "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Norwegian Wood", "Eight Miles High" and "Paint It Black". Other members of the Folkswingers for this release included jazz musicians such as Herb Ellis and Dennis Budimir, and members of the Los Angeles pool of session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew (music), the Wrecking Crew. While it was intended to capitalize on the raga roc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harihar Rao
Harihar Rao (January 21, 1927 – January 13, 2013) was an Indian-born American musician, noted for playing tabla and sitar. He was born into a prominent musical family in Mangalore, India. He moved to the United States in 1964, residing in Pasadena, California. Rao was a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA., He worked in the ethnomusicology department at UCLA and privately taught and mentored students of the sitar. Rao explored a variety of fusions of Indian and western music. His 'Hindustani Jazz Sextet', which included the trumpeter Don Ellis, combined classical Indian rhythms and jazz forms. In 1965 Rao and Ellis co-wrote ''An Introduction to Indian Music for the Jazz Musician'', which was printed by Jazz Magazine. The 1966 album ''Raga Rock'' combined Rao's sitar playing with the Folkswingers' western instruments to cover popular rock songs, such as "Paint It Black" and " Norwegian Wood". In 1967, Rao published the book ''Introduction to Sitar'', which sold more than 500 copies ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |