Raga Guitar

Awesome reissue! The world famous Impulse jazz catalogue is so cavernous you truly need a music-minded flashlight to uncover its deepest and darkest secrets. Thankfully Light In The Attic has recently acquired such luminescent technology and the first discovery is Hungarian guitarist GABOR SZABO’s 1967 Indo-fusion landmark, Jazz Raga. combines Szabo's distinctive 6-string touch & open-minded ideas. It brings together jazz, pop-rock & his native European influence, along with hypnotic sitar, stoned bass vibrations, occasional psychedelic vocals & the laidback. Totally essential!

The Folkswingers, a studio-only group comprised of a changeable cast of top Los Angeles session musicians, had issued a couple of instrumental LPs showcasing the 12-string guitar before leaping on the raga-rock bandwagon with Raga Rock in 1966. Give the World Pacific label a little credit, though: at least they jumped on that bandwagon real fast, almost right after the term "raga-rock" was first used. Plus, the record did employ the cream of the cream from the L.A. rock session world, with Hal Blaine on drums; Larry Knechtel on keyboards; Tommy Tedesco, Howard Roberts, and Herb Ellis on guitar; and Lyle Ritz and Bill Pittman on bass. And it did at least have an actual sitar, courtesy of Harihar Rao, leader of Los Angeles' Ravi Shankar Music Circle and director of the Indian Studies Group at UCLA's Institute of Ethnomusicology…

Jazz Raga, recorded in August of 1966, and released in early 1967, is Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo's third album for Impulse!, and his most exotic and mysterious. Szabo not only played guitar on the live-to-two-track sessions, he also overdubbed sitar on nine of the album's eleven cuts…

Representing the sixth generation of a family of musicians and sarod masters and it's tradition known as the Senia Bangash Gharana, Ustad (maestro) Amjad Ali Khan is steeped in the classical Indian tradition of ragas and talas, which he learnt first from his father and guru Ustad Haafiz Ali Khan from the court of Gwalior, a true capital of North Indian classical music since the height of the Mughal Empire. In turn, Amjad Ali Khan has been guru to his two sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangaash, so the family tradition continues with a seventh generation and flourishes on the world stage as never before.

Representing the sixth generation of a family of musicians and sarod masters and it's tradition known as the Senia Bangash Gharana, Ustad (maestro) Amjad Ali Khan is steeped in the classical Indian tradition of ragas and talas, which he learnt first from his father and guru Ustad Haafiz Ali Khan from the court of Gwalior, a true capital of North Indian classical music since the height of the Mughal Empire. In turn, Amjad Ali Khan has been guru to his two sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangaash, so the family tradition continues with a seventh generation and flourishes on the world stage as never before.

Robbie Basho was one of the big three American acoustic guitar innovators, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the other two. Basho was the least commercially successful of the three, but his influence and reputation has steadily grown since his untimely death in 1986 at the age of 45. And with good reason; for Basho's deeply spiritual approach, intellectual rigor, and formal explorations (among his goals was the creation of a raga system for American music), present a deeply compelling, multi-faceted artist. Basho was actually a college friend of John Fahey, and his early recordings (like Kottke's) were for Fahey's Takoma label. Following Fahey 's move to Vanguard, Basho followed suit, and released Voice of the Eagle and Zarthus for the label in 1972 and 1974, respectively (his most commercially successful records were made for the Windham Hill label later in the decade)./quote]