Raga Guitar

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…

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 feat. Harihar Rao ‎- Raga Rock
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC (tracks): 199 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Fallout # FOCD2039 | Country/Year: UK 2007, 1966
Genre: Rock, Folk | Style: Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock

"This heady blend of instrumental pop covers, fuzzed-up guitars and sitar is a kitsch blast from start to finish. Featuring the cream of LA's session players alongside sitar virtuoso Harihar Rao (Ravi Shankar's senior disciple), it was originally released in 1966 and makes its long-overdue CD debut here, showing itself to be the first and best ‘sitarsploitation’ album ever recorded."

In classical Indian music, ragas are the melodic foundations for improvisation and composition. Similar to scales in Western music, ragas consist of a specific series of notes (in some cases differing in ascent and descent) but they also call for characteristic musical motifs and embellishments.

Essence of Raga Tala is a unique and compelling take on Indian musical tradition; nine Indian ragas and selected talas are re-imagined for both traditional and western instruments in new and exciting directions.

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…