Before Woodstock, before George Harrison's lessons, before the sitar became the 1960s' most borrowed sound, there was a patient decade of work: Ravi Shankar touring America, explaining ragas to jazz audiences, and recording for a small California label called World Pacific. Those American LPs are where East-meets-West actually happened, groove by groove, and two of them sit in our crates.
Why the American records matter
Shankar's Indian recordings for HMV document a master within his own tradition. The American records document something rarer: a musician translating that tradition in real time for listeners who had never heard a tanpura. The liner notes teach raga structure from first principles. The programming deliberately pairs accessible pieces with deep water. The recordings, made in studios accustomed to jazz, capture the sitar with a closeness Indian pressings of the era rarely attempted.
Improvisations (1962), in our crates on World Pacific, is the summit of the experiment: alongside the raga performances sits a collaboration with jazz flautist Bud Shank, including music from Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. Indo-jazz fusion effectively begins here, years before the rock world noticed the sitar existed.
In San Francisco, our other World Pacific copy, catches the concert Shankar of the mid-1960s, playing to the city about to make him an icon of its counterculture, still on his own uncompromised terms: full-length ragas, tabla dialogue, patience as a musical value.
The ripple effects, on one shelf
Collect these records and you are collecting the source code for a decade of Western music: the Byrds and Beatles borrowings, the raga-rock wave, and the fusion experiments that followed. Our copy of Ananda Shankar's 1970 Reprise debut, his nephew wiring the sitar into Moog-era psychedelia, is the family's own next chapter, and the three records together make a complete argument about how influence actually travels.
Collecting notes
- US originals versus Indian pressings. The World Pacific originals were pressed for the American market; copies that reached India came as imports in travellers' luggage, which makes them genuinely uncommon in Indian crates and a small coup to find here.
- Condition on sitar records is merciless. The instrument's sympathetic strings shimmer in exactly the frequency range where groove wear hisses. Inner-groove inspection, per our buying checklist, is essential.
- Liner notes are part of the artefact. These sleeves were pedagogical documents; complete, clean jackets carry real weight.
- Do not overlook the Indian HMV catalogue either: the domestic recitals on His Master's Voice, like the Vilayat Khan and Ali Akbar Khan records in our classical crates, are the tradition the American records were translating from.
The listening advice
Give a raga the time it asks. These records were revolutionary precisely because they refused to compress: a single side is a single journey, alap to jhala, and the reward compounds with attention. Play Improvisations for the fusion, then In San Francisco for the real thing, and you will hear what American audiences heard in 1967: not exotic decoration, but a complete musical civilisation arriving at full strength. The classical shelf holds whatever the crates have surrendered this month.
