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This genre-crossing Tiny Desk follows an illustrious line of Hindustani and Western music collisions. In the mid-1960s, many Americans had their first taste of music from India when Beatle George Harrison played the sitar on „Norwegian Wood.“ At the same time, in the classical world, violinist Yehudi Menuhin joined sitar star Ravi Shankar to release West Meets East, a Billboard chart-topping album that won a Grammy.
These days, as genres routinely tangle and even dissolve into themselves, the broad-minded classical guitarist Sharon Isbin continues the tradition. She’s been playing and recording with Strings for Peace, a distinguished family of Indian musicians who play the sarod, a darker-toned cousin of the sitar. Amjad Ali Khan — joined by his sons Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash — represents the sixth generation of sarod players in his family, which helped develop the instrument itself over several hundred years. Their beautiful, singing sarods are made in Kolkata with vintage teak wood and goat skin.
Two traditional-sounding works composed by Khan open and close the set. Isbin’s delicate, rounded tones swap call and response riffs with the shimmering, slippery and stentorian sarods in music that both mesmerizes and reaches ecstatic heights, punctuated by Amit Kavthekar’s percolating tabla.
In between, Isbin alone offers one of her calling cards: the flamenco-inflected Spanish Dance No. 5, „Andaluza“ by Enrique Granados. Composed around 1890, the music, she explains, has multicultural roots — beginning with the Romani people who migrated thousands of miles from India to Spain.
In our current musical genre-verse, everything, everywhere seems, in some way, connected.
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