[Listen] Ravi Shankar’s unending Bangladesh connection
To anyone who has followed the cultural aspect of Bangladesh's struggle for Independence, it is general knowledge that it was sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, a son of this soil, who let the story of the Liberation War be heard across the world. He told his good friend George Harrison, the Beatles front-man, of the horrendous incidents happening here in 1971, and thus was conceived The Concert For Bangladesh, the first benefit concert of its scale in the world. It was with Harrison's immortal song “Bangla Desh” at the back-to-back jam-packed concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden featuring some of the world's biggest music stars -- Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, along with Indian classical music masters Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Alla Rakha and Shankar himself, that the Western world got to know about our struggles.
Earlier the same year, Pandit Ravi Shankar performed a morning concert in his home on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, California with Harrison in attendance. As Ravi's wife Sukanya Shankar attested, this performance most certainly sowed the seed for the overwhelmingly successful Concert for Bangladesh.
Now, 45 years later, an album of that previously-unheard music has just released, and in a preview of one of the tracks you can hear his concern for Bangladesh. The album, titled “In Hollywood, 1971”, has re-mastered the tapes from that concert. In the first track available for preview on the BandCamp web site, Shankar can be heard saying: “You know how much being a Bengali myself, we are very much disturbed with all that is happening … the whole Bangladesh thing … this is, (strokes sitar) one of the very beautiful folk tunes, (inaudible), from Bangladesh”, before he proceeds to play a familiar Bangla folk tune.
The other tracks in the album are Raga Vibhas, Raga Parameshwari and Raga Sindhi Bhairavi. Earlier this year, Northern Spy Records released “In Hollywood, 1971” on a limited edition of two long plays, for Record Store Day 2016. Profits from this release benefitted The Ravi Shankar Foundation, which serves to educate the world about Indian classical music and to preserve the archive of Ravi Shankar. They later partnered with East Meets West Music to release the album as a digital album and a CD.
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