Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Saturday night

Hugh Masekela
(1939 - )

Ever since the mid-1960s, Hugh Masekela has been recognized as one of the leaders in world music and fusion jazz. Among his earliest professional engagements was a gig playing with the Huddleston Jazz Band, led by anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston. He later married singer Miriam Makeba, and the two left South Africa at the start of the 1960s. Masekela’s career took off in the mid-1960s, as both a recording artist and performer—he was signed to record for MGM, Mercury Records, Verve Records, and the Uni label, while he and Makeba were the two most prominent South African musicians in America.

Along with Ravi Shankar and the Canadian group the Paupers, Masekela helped make the Monterey Pop Festival into a truly international event. A year after the festival, he enjoyed a worldwide hit with the song “Grazing In The Grass,” which sold four million copies. He returned to South Africa in the 1980s and achieved new levels of recognition through his association with Paul Simon on the Graceland tour.

The Byrds

Roger McGuinn—Vocals, 12-string guitar
David Crosby—Rhythm guitar, vocals
Chris Hillman—Bass, vocals
Michael Clarke—Drums

Co-founded by Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark, with Michael Clarke and Chris Hillman joining later, The Byrds debuted with an amplified arrangement of an edited version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” that topped the charts, and coined the term “folk-rock.” By the spring of 1966, soon after recording “Eight Miles High,” Gene Clark departed and the group was reduced to a quartet. That was the line-up that played Monterey, though it wouldn’t last long—David Crosby left a few weeks later, during the recording of the Notorious Byrd Brothers album, eventually to form Crosby, Stills and Nash. His successors, Gram Parsons and then Clarence White, took the group in the direction of country-rock, which defined their sound for their last five years before disbanding. Thus, Monterey was virtually the last time, apart from latter-day reunions of the members, that anyone would see or hear the original Byrds line-up in concert.

Roger McGuinn—Vocals, 12-string guitar, banjo
(1942 - )

In 1964, Roger McGuinn was already a veteran of the folk music scene, having performed and recorded with The Limelighters, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Bobby Darin, Hoyt Axton, and Judy Collins, among others, when he started listening to the music of the British invasion. He’d already begun playing Beatles songs on acoustic guitar when he crossed paths with Gene Clark and David Crosby. By the end of 1964, they’d added electric guitars—most notably McGuinn’s 12-string Rickenbacker—and melded some of the more striking characteristics of rock and roll and folk music into something new, embodied in their debut single, “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Since disbanding The Byrds in 1973, McGuinn has recorded and performed in various solo and group contexts, and is one of the most respected rock musicians of the 1960s.

David Crosby—Vocals, rhythm guitar
(1941 - )

The son of Oscar-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby, David Crosby quit drama school to pursue music as a member of the Les Baxter Balladeers in 1961. Crosby soon crossed paths with musicians Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark, and formed The Jet Set, later rechristened The Byrds. Crosby was the romantic voice within the group; his more daring, edgy songs—such as “Triad,”—weren’t always well received by the rest of the group, and by the time of Monterey he was constantly at odds with them. He outraged his bandmates by joining The Byrds’ rivals The Buffalo Springfield on stage, and followed it the next night with a harangue during their own set about the murder of President Kennedy. By late 1967, he’d left the band. In 1968, with encouragement from Cass Elliot and Joni Mitchell, he’d begun singing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, and next re-emerged in 1969 as part of Crosby, Stills and Nash. In the ensuing decades, apart from his work as part of that trio/quartet, and his well-publicized struggles with various personal demons, Crosby has recorded a beautiful body of work as a solo artist and reunited with his former CSN bandmates.

Chris Hillman—Bass, Vocals
(1944 - )

As a member of The Hillmen, Chris Hillman was one of the top mandolin players in the country in 1963. A year later, he joined The Byrds on bass, an instrument to which he was entirely new. Following David Crosby’s exit from the group, Hillman recruited Gram Parsons as a replacement, and the two helped steer the group into country-rock, then a new sound in ‘60s music. He and Parsons later left The Byrds to form the influential Flying Burrito Brothers before joining Stephen Stills’ band Manassas, and then the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. He and Roger McGuinn re-teamed with fellow ex-Byrd Gene Clark to form McGuinn-Clark-Hillman, but following their breakup at the end of the 1970s, Hillman turned back to country music, ultimately forming The Desert Rose Band, which carried him into the 1990s on a wave of commercial success.

Michael Clarke—Drums
(1946 - 1993)

Michael Clarke was the heartthrob in The Byrds lineup—a former bongo player, he was actually better at looking good than he was behind the drum kit in the early days of the band (legendary session drummer Hal Blaine played on the single “Mr. Tambourine Man). He left the Byrds during the tail-end of recording the Notorious Byrd Brothers album in 1967, and turned up the following year recording with his fellow ex-Byrd Gene Clark, and in 1970 became a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers. By 1975, Clarke had moved on to the soft country rock band Firefall. During the 1980s, he became part of a legal battle with his former bandmates over his use of the group name in connection with various bands that he had assembled for live performances. The dispute became moot, however, as his health declined in the early 1990s and he was forced to stop performing. Clarke died of liver failure in 1993.

The Jefferson Airplane

Marty Balin—Vocals
Grace Slick—Vocals
Paul Kantner—Guitar, vocals
Jorma Kaukonen—Lead guitar, vocals
Jack Casady—Bass
Spencer Dryden—Drums

The band originated as part of the San Francisco folk scene in the mid-1960s, when Marty Balin organized a group to play at the Matrix, a club he founded. Balin pulled together an outfit that consisted of himself on vocals and guitar, Paul Kantner on rhythm guitar and vocals, Kantner’s longtime friend Jack Casady on bass, folksinger Signe Anderson on vocals, and Skip Spence—who was actually a guitarist—playing drums. The group was signed to RCA and their first album, Takes Off, released in mid-1966, was daring enough to be censored at the time of its release. It offered an amplified brand of folk-rock, similar in scope and range to what the Byrds were presenting on their Fifth Dimension album, but a lot looser in structure. It also failed to sell in any significant numbers.

By the second half of 1966, Signe Anderson, who had become pregnant, left the band; and Skip Spence left to play the drums for Moby Grape. Spencer Dryden replaced Spence; Anderson’s successor was Grace Slick, a member of rival group The Great Society that had disintegrated earlier that summer. Slick brought with her a powerful voice and two songs, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” transforming the group’s whole history. The Monterey performance actually showed off the Airplane Mark 2—they were still performing songs structured within traditional boundaries and lengths. But within a year, the group would begin blowing out the running times of their songs with long, discursive jams, and also began embracing political messages.

By the end of the 1960s, and with their appearance at Woodstock, the Airplane, now under the control of Slick and Kantner, were an ideologically confrontational band seemingly trashing the “establishment” with their every nuance. Their evolution, coupled with sheer luck, resulted in their being the only band that played the three most famous and notorious outdoor rock shows of the 1960s: Monterey, Woodstock, and Altamont. By the early 1970s, Balin departed. They transmuted into The Jefferson Starship during the mid-1970s with Balin back in the fold—with the departure of all of the original Airplane members, that group dropped the “Jefferson” from their name and became simply “Starship.”

Marty Balin—Vocals, guitar
(1942 - )

Originally intending to be a painter, Marty Balin cut his first solo singles in 1962 for the Challenge Records label. He passed through the line-ups of folk groups The Town Criers and The Gateway Singers during the early/middle-1960s, crossing paths with Paul Kantner at the time. In 1965, he was in the process of founding a club, the Matrix, and wanted to put together a house band—the result was the original Jefferson Airplane. That incarnation of the Airplane was modestly successful in San Francisco but, despite a promising debut album, didn’t really attract a following outside of the San Francisco Bay area. Following Spence’s departure and replacement by Spencer Dryden, and Anderson’s replacement by Grace Slick, the story changed, for the group and for Balin.

He left the group at the start of 1971, but after a couple of failed solo ventures he rejoined, first as a songwriter and then as a full-fledged member. Balin enjoyed a string of solo hits in the early 1980s, before rejoining Kanter and Casady in The KBC Band. In 1989, Balin reunited with Slick, Kantner, Kaukonen, and Casady for a tour and an album, in the wake of their linking up to defend their ownership of The Jefferson Airplane name against their one-time manager. He has maintained an intermittent solo recording career in the years since.

Grace Slick—Vocals, recorder, keyboards
(1939 - )

Grace Slick was the most prominent member of The Jefferson Airplane, and also the last of the classic line-up to come aboard. Chicago-born (with the name Grace Wing), she became a fashion model before entering music with her first husband, Jerry Slick—with Slick’s brother Darby, they formed a group called The Great Society, but didn’t sell many records, even when they released an original song called “Somebody to Love.” In late 1966, after Signe Anderson left The Jefferson Airplane, Slick became her replacement, and the group was transformed—Slick was a more powerful and dramatic singer, and her modeling had shown her how to get the most out of a look and image. The two songs that she brought with her from The Great Society, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” both reached the Top 10 in 1967 and drove the Surrealistic Pillow album to gold record status. The latter song, in particular, which Slick wrote, defined the pop side of “acid rock” for the remainder of the decade. Over the next six years, Slick—usually in partnership with fellow band member Paul Kantner, whom she later married—became the most well known member of the Airplane.

Following the late success of The Airplane and the Jefferson Starship, Slick embarked on a solo career, even as she continued as a member of The Jefferson Starship. She remained with the group through the chart-topping hits “We Built This City” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” In 1989, Slick rejoined The Jefferson Airplane for the reunion tour and album. In 1998, she published her autobiography, Somebody to Love.

Paul Kantner—Guitar, vocals
(1942 - )

A native San Franciscan, Paul Kantner was a friend of Marty Balin’s before he’d ever thought of forming The Jefferson Airplane, and he was the first person Balin asked to join the group. Kantner played a prominent role as rhythm guitarist and back-up singer on the group’s first two albums, but he quickly found a kindred spirit in new member Grace Slick, and by the time of the third album, they’d effectively become the leaders of the group in terms of songwriting and presence on the recordings. As the line-up began to splinter, Kantner cut a solo album, Blows Against the Empire (1970), and he and Slick, who had married, cut an album together, Sunfighter (1971). The two later re-configured The Jefferson Airplane as The Jefferson Starship, which enjoyed another five years of success. Kantner subsequently formed The KBC Band with Balin and Jack Casady. In 1989, he participated in a reunion of The Jefferson Airplane for a tour and album, and has since revived The Jefferson Starship.

Jorma Kaukonen—Lead guitar, vocals
(1940 - )

By the early 1960s, Jorma Kaukonen was a resident of San Francisco and part of that city’s burgeoning folk music revival. In the course of playing in clubs around the city, he crossed paths with Janis Joplin, among others, and even served as her accompanist for a short time. Fluent in blues, bluegrass, country, jazz, and even classical technique, Kaukonen was a natural as a founding member of The Jefferson Airplane, and his playing is one of the highlights of the band’s debut album. In 1970, Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady, who had been friends long before joining the Airplane, formed Hot Tuna, which proved one of the most successful offshoot groups to emerge from a successful ‘60s band. Kaukonen released a solo album, Blue Country Heart, on Columbia Records in 2002.

Jack Casady—Bass
(1944 - )

Jack Casady was brought into The Jefferson Airplane fold by his friend Jorma Kaukonen. Although originally a guitarist, Casady switched to bass in the early 1960s. Casady and Kaukonen both had a deep interest in blues music, and in 1970 they formed an offshoot group called Hot Tuna, specifically to play the kind of music that the Airplane was no longer performing. As it turned out, Hot Tuna outlasted the Airplane, and even after the duo’s first split in 1978, Casady has periodically returned to play with his former bandmates in various configurations, including The KBC Band and the reformed Jefferson Airplane.

Spencer Dryden—Drums, percussion
(1938 - )

During his teens and early twenties, Spencer Dryden was a full-fledged working jazz drummer. It was the commercial allure of rock ‘n’ roll that pulled him away and into a group called The Ashes, which lasted until 1966. By sheer luck, just as the group had splintered, Dryden was invited to audition for The Jefferson Airplane, whose original drummer, Skip Spence, had just quit. Dryden lasted with the group for four years, until the end of 1969, and he left officially in early 1970—he was the only member of the classic line-up not to be asked back for the 1989 reunion. During the 1970s, Dryden moved on to a more stable and satisfying gig as a member of The New Riders of the Purple Sage, and subsequently became their manager. He continued to play in San Francisco until the mid-1990s, when he retired from performing.

Laura Nyro
(1947 - 1997)

Laura Nyro was one of those musical talents too imposing to ignore, and too diverse to categorize. Born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, New York, she was the daughter of a jazz trumpet player and began writing songs when she was eight years old. Her formal music education coincided with the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, the folk music revival of the early 1960s, and the birth of such hybrid genres as folk-rock and jazz-rock. When she began performing in her late teens she seemed poised to become part of the new music—blurring the boundaries of rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and classical. Her debut album, More Than A New Discovery, released by Verve Records when she was nineteen, contained several songs, including “Wedding Bell Blues” and “And When I Die,” that became hits in the hands of The Fifth Dimension and Blood, Sweat and Tears, among others. As it turned out, Nyro was the one performer at the Monterey Pop Festival who may have challenged the audience a little too much—her sound was too eclectic for that audience, and she was booed by large segments of the crowd. However, she was seen and heard by David Geffen, a young agent’s assistant just starting out in his career as a talent manager. He became Nyro’s manager and got her signed to Columbia Records—her first album for the new label, Eli and The Thirteenth Confession, yielded virtually a career’s worth of hits for Nyro as a songwriter, including “Eli’s Comin’” (later a monster single for Three Dog Night) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” for The Fifth Dimension. During 1968, Nyro was seen increasingly as a potential star performer—Blood, Sweat and Tears, left without a lead singer by the departure of Al Kooper, auditioned her for the spot. It was only with her third album, New York Tendaberry, that Nyro’s following as a performer and recording artist began to catch up with her success as a composer. Following a detour into marriage and divorce, she resumed her career in the late 1970s, a period—dominated by punk, disco, and power-pop—that was extremely inhospitable to her musical talent, and she gradually withdrew from performing for a period lasting more than five years. In 1984, she made something of a comeback with the album Mother’s Spiritual—one of the most introspective of her career, that was well received critically. She died of ovarian cancer in 1997.

Otis Redding with Booker T. and The MG’s

Otis Redding—Vocals
Booker T. Jones—Organ
Steve Cropper—Guitar
Donald “Duck” Dunn—Bass
Al Jackson, Jr.—Drums

Beginning in 1962, when he recorded “These Arms of Mine” at the tail-end of a session for Johnny Jenkins, Otis Redding had built a steadily growing following. Following the death of Sam Cooke in December of 1964, Redding had become the most important soul singer in America and had begun building up a major audience in Europe as well. Most of his audience in America, however, was confined to black listeners—his records had never crossed over to the pop charts. Monterey marked the first concert in America where he played to an almost entirely white audience—a little more than five months later, he recorded “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which seemed to open a new phase in his musical output. Just a few days later, on December 10, 1967, Redding died in a plane crash. The single, released posthumously, became his first number one pop hit and his biggest selling record ever.

Booker T. and The MG’s roots went back to 1960, when keyboard player Booker T. Jones met guitarist Steve Cropper when both were working as session men at Stax Records. The two found that they enjoyed working together and soon, with the addition of drummer Al Jackson, Jr. and bassist Lewis Steinberg, they formed Booker T. and The MG’s (for Memphis Group). They scored what would prove to be the biggest hit of their career with their first single, the instrumental “Green Onions,” which reached number three on the charts and has since become one of the most often covered and anthologized of rock/soul instrumentals.

The group was quickly ensconced as the top house band at Stax, backing Wilson Pickett and Sam and Dave. The only membership change they ever had came in late 1964 when Steinberg left and was replaced by Donald “Duck” Dunn. In the spring of 1967, Redding toured Europe with Booker T. and The MG’s, to great success, and they were booked together at Monterey. The year 1967 was a breakthrough year for the group as well as for Redding—after several years without chart success, they opened up an era of hit singles, including “Hang ‘Em High,” “Hip Hug-Her,” “Groovin’,” and “Soul-Limbo,” which allowed them to cross over to mainstream white audiences. The group split up in the early 1970s, and Jackson was murdered in 1975 during a burglary of his home. The surviving members reformed in 1992 to play the Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden, and to back up Neil Young on his 1993 tour, before recording a reunion album.

Otis Redding—Vocals
(1941 - 1967)

Otis Redding was arguably the greatest soul singer who ever lived—he also proved to be soul music’s most important conduit beyond the boundaries of a solely black listener-ship. His career was almost a fluke—in 1962, while playing as a member of the band backing Johnny Jenkins, there was time left over at a recording session, and Redding was given the chance to cut “These Arms of Mine.” The resulting single became a hit, and suddenly Redding was out of Jenkins’ band and working on his own as Stax Records’ newest star. His early solo sides were mostly covers of familiar material, of which the most important influence was that of Sam Cooke. A pioneering soul artist, Cooke had his own record label and a publishing company, and wrote songs that were as distinctive as anything being recorded in the R&B field at the time. When Cooke was shot to death in December of 1964, Redding effectively assumed the position that he left vacant. His best songs were his later covers of Cooke’s music, including “Shake” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Devoid of pop trimmings or any compromise, they were startling records and tangibly established Redding’s claim to Cooke’s cultural legacy.

The only thing that Otis Redding hadn’t done by 1967 was attract a large white audience in America. By all accounts, he was nervous about appearing at Monterey—an audience of 50,000 mostly white faces, the “love crowd,” as he called them, awaited. The performance shouldn’t have worked, as he went on late and because of the statutory midnight curfew, the plug had to be pulled after just a handful of numbers. In the end, it didn’t matter—none of the other performers at the Festival had ever seen a singer or a band dominate a stage or an audience the way that Otis Redding and Booker T. and The MG’s did with those five songs. It marked a breakthrough to mass acceptance by a white listenership, and it was arguably the most important moment musically in the three-day Festival.

In the fall of 1967, Redding had gone in for surgery to remove nodules from his vocal cords, which sidelined him as a singer for almost two months. He began making plans to carry on with what Sam Cooke had started in the early ‘60s, looking into the idea of forming a talent agency and cooperative with some of the other top black artists of the period. In early December, he resumed recording with what was to have been the first tangible product of that new sound, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” However, it was to be an ending—on December 10, 1967, just a few days after finishing the track, Redding and members of his touring band were killed when the small plane they were aboard crashed in Lake Monona in Wisconsin. The single, released a few weeks later, became his first chart-topping pop hit and his biggest selling record.

Booker T. Jones—Organ
(1944 - )

One of the most renowned soul organists in the world—Booker T. Jones started out professionally as a protégé of Willie Mitchell, playing in the latter’s band before joining Stax Records as a session musician at the start of the 1960s. From 1962 onward, he was —in tandem with guitarist Steve Cropper—the focal point of Booker T. and The MG’s for ten years. He cut a solo album, The Runaway, for MCA in 1972, but his big success of that era was as a producer on Bill Withers’ 1971 hit “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Jones continues to work on his own occasional recordings (most notably “I Want You” in 1981) and as a producer.

Steve Cropper—Guitar
(1941 - )

An R&B enthusiast from childhood, Steve Cropper started out in music professionally as a member of the Stax Records house band The Mar-Keys. His meeting with Booker T. Jones, an organist and session player at Stax, led the two to form Booker T. and The MG’s, a quartet with a lean, powerful sound rooted in organ and guitar. They took the world by storm, both on their own sides and those of the singers they backed up, often with Cropper serving as producer, as well as a big share of the songs, most notably co-authoring “In the Midnight Hour.” When Otis Redding died in December of 1967, it fell to Cropper as his producer to pull together a releasable album around his final single, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”

In the 1970s, Cropper gave up most of his guitar duties following the split of the MG’s, and became a full-time producer, working with Jeff Beck and other top artists. With the rebirth of interest in the Memphis sound and Stax/Volt Records in the 1980s, he suddenly found himself in demand as a performing musician once again. Among Cropper’s most enduring work, he was the guiding hand behind The Blues Brothers, making the sound behind the Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi comedy routine work as legitimate soul music. He and his bandmate Donald “Duck” Dunn both became members of The Blues Brothers’ touring band.

Donald “Duck” Dunn—Bass
(1941 - )

Like his boyhood friend Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn had been an R&B enthusiast, and a member of The Mar-Keys before joining Booker T. and The MG’s. He stayed with The Mar-Keys until 1964, when the bass spot in Booker T. and The MG’s opened up with Lewis Steinberg’s departure. Dunn was the obvious replacement, and over the next eight years he became perhaps the most famous bass player in soul music. Following the breakup of the MG’s and the closing of Stax Records in the mid-1970s, Dunn became one of the most in-demand bassists in rock music, playing and recording with Eric Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, and Muddy Waters. He and Cropper were also members of The Blues Brothers Band and could be seen in John Landis’ Blues Brothers 2000 (1998), along with their long-ago Stax (and Atlantic) labelmates Wilson Pickett and Eddie Floyd.

Al Jackson, Jr.—Drums
(1934 - 1975)

Al Jackson, Jr. was the only member of Booker T. and The MG’s who didn’t live long enough to cash in on the success of that band. Born in Memphis, he started out professionally on the Hi Records label, playing drums behind the likes of Al Green and Ann Peebles, and by the early 1960s was reputed to be the best drummer in Memphis. In 1962, he was persuaded by Booker T. Jones to join Booker T. and the MG’s. In tandem with Lewis Steinberg and, later, Donald “Duck” Dunn, he could be heard on dozens of hits to come out of Stax Records over the next decade, including the MG’s own charting singles. During the early 1970s, he began playing sessions for an array of top artists, among them Eric Clapton, Donny Hathaway, Freddie King, and Herbie Mann. He was set to play on a proposed reunion album by the MG’s late in 1975, but the record never happened—on October 1st of that year, Jackson was shot to death, apparently during an interrupted burglary of his home.

Sunday afternoon

Ravi Shankar
(1920 - )

It was the presence of Ravi Shankar, as well as Hugh Masekela, that made the Monterey International Pop festival live up to the “international” name—and it was Shankar that provided the movie with what was arguably its high point, an extended musical and visual section of sublime beauty that quietly overwhelmed much of what surrounded it.

Born into a Brahmin family in Varanasi near Benares in West Bengal, Shankar entered music by way of his older brother Uday Shankar’s Company of Hindu Dance and Music. At fourteen, he first met Allauddin Khan, a multi-instrumentalist musician and the father of Ali Akbar Khan, who had joined Uday Shankar’s company. Ravi Shankar, who had considered a career as a dancer, instead became a student of Allauddin Khan for six years, ending in 1944. As an emerging giant of the sitar, his performances of Hindustani music were in demand across India and he began recording for the EMI Records imprint HMV Records, as well as serving as the music director for All India Radio from 1949 until 1956. Due in part to India’s informal alliance with the Soviet bloc, Shankar gave his first performance outside of his native country in the Soviet Union in 1954, but by 1956 had begun making concert appearances in western Europe and the United States. During the early 1960s, some of his recordings began appearing on EMI Records in England, but in the United States several of them were licensed to the tiny World Pacific label, a contractual relationship that would ultimately lead to Shankar’s becoming the most famous non-Western musician in the Western world.

Events related to but separate from Shankar’s own performances and recordings during the 1960s would elevate him to superstar status. In 1965, during the filming of the movie Help, Beatles lead guitarist George Harrison became intrigued by the sound of the sitar. He began experimenting with it, even using it on the song “Norwegian Wood.” In 1965, The Beatles were in America and Harrison spent some time in Los Angeles in the company of David Crosby, the rhythm guitarist and co-founder of The Byrds. While showing Harrison around, he brought The Beatles guitarist to World Pacific Studios, where The Byrds’ manager Jim Dickson was a producer, and where the group often rehearsed. While there, Crosby played some of Shankar’s records for him. It was from that introduction to Shankar’s music that Harrison sought out the sitar virtuoso. It was Harrison’s studies with Shankar and embrace of Hindustani music that opened an entire generation of Western youth to some greater knowledge and awareness of the Indian sub-continent, which culminated with the Concert for Bangladesh benefit organized by Harrison and Shankar.

Shankar engaged in formal collaborations with such Western music virtuosi as Andre Previn and Yehudi Menuhin in concert and on recordings, and his performances from the 1960s onward have all been regarded as major musical events.


Continued in Monterey Pop Artist Bios - part four

Categories: Film Essays