Indian music

Thursday

Ian Thomson

It takes a trained ear fully to appreciate Indian music

At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to tune their sitars and tablas. ‘If you appreciated the tuning so much,’ Shankar said, half in jest, ‘I hope you’ll enjoy the music even more.’ To the untrained ear, Indian music may sound unmelodious and directionless as it strays into apparent pre-concert tuning registers and monotony. Nonetheless, its transcendental Zen-like qualities impressed Richard Wagner, who was drawn to the spirituality and joss-stick mysticism (as he saw it) of the east. A devotional song performed by the Punjab Sufi vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan can soar as ecstatically as Parsifal. Indeed

Thursday

Michael Hann

A perfect welcome back to live music: Sarathy Korwar at Kings Place reviewed

There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the business side of things. Our dirty secret is that, for all our exquisite taste, most of us — with a few exceptions — have no conception of what the rest of the world actually wants from their music. The first piece I ever wrote was a student newspaper review of a gig in a Leeds pub, in which I gushed about the headliners but noted, with a sneer, the fact that the support didn’t appear to have any actual tunes. We would be hearing no more from them, I cautioned.