Utter Joy Uninhibited

"If I may say so without offending anyone," says Sitarist Ravi Shankar with a definite air of passive insistence, "in the United States people are too much used to things being sold, to publicity. Something comes in the air -- a yoyo, Tiny Tim, Nehru shirts, transcendentalism -- and people go all out for it. When there is something else, they turn their face. It hurts me to see people being so fickle."

Shankar should know. After the Beatles introduced the resonant sound of the stringed sitar to rock in Norwegian Wood (1965) and their imitators began twanging along, Shankar suddenly found himself the hero of the pop, hippie and fashion worlds. Then, just as suddenly, the fad passed. The teeny-boppers returned to their Bee Gees, and the hippies began playing Erik Satie at their acid parties. Though dismayed by the abruptness of it all, Shankar realized that it was probably just as well. With good reason. Horror of horrors, he confided, "they took me for a pop musician."

As Shankar demonstrated at his sixday "Festival from India" in Manhattan last week, he is the farthest thing imaginable from a pop musician. Rather, he is the foremost practitioner of one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated musical arts. Weaving the melodies of the classic raga into the intricate rhythms of the tala, he improvised compositions of the utmost subtlety, reveling in the musical growth that was taking place under his fingers, glorying in the sweat on his swarthy face. Playing a raga can be "like mounting a fiery horse," he says. His audiences could tell what he meant.

7 1/2 to the Bar. Shankar also proved something else: that Indian music means a lot more than just the sitar and its familiar partners, the two-drum tabla and the string-drone tamboura. Indian music has its origins in Vedic hymns that date back 2,000 years. Indians have always believed that music has the power to change human destiny. Their sacred chants had to be intoned just so; a mistake could ruin everything. Thus, if Vocalist Jitendra Abhisheki seemed ner vous as he came out for a selection of Vedic chants, it was understandable. But his nasal, three-note invocation to Saraswati, goddess of learning and music, was flawless.

In addition to vocal music, Shankar presented ten masters of strange-sounding wind and percussion instruments--the sarod, santoor, shehnai, sarangi, mri-dangam and venu. It was a first of sorts when the players all padded onstage to perform Shankar's ensemble piece, V-7 1/2, a vigorous ten-minute raga played at a tricky 7 1/2 beats to the bar. It was also the first time that so many Indian musicians had been seen west of Bombay on one Oriental rug.

Shankar's display of musical hypnotism clearly dramatized the essential difference between Western and Indian music. Much of Western music is an ex pressive artistic message delivered--as if in a package--directly to the listener. Indian music attempts to induce a loftier, more profound emotional and spiritual state in the listener through a steady, stroboscopic kind of rhythmic and melodic bedazzlement. At the height of a raga, says Shankar, "it is utter joy, uninhibited, that an artist experiences. The raga, the musician, the listeners, all become one." That is something that India's Ravi Shankar may say without offending anyone.

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