BN-LA-529-H2

Paul Horn In India

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

New Delhi, India, April or May, 1967
Paul Horn, flute; J.N. Shivpuri, sitar; Rajinder Raina, tabla; Shri Chunilal Kaul, dilruba, tambura, vocals.

Arti (Prayer Song)
Raga Ahir Bhairao
Tabla Solo In Teental
Raga Puira Dhanashri
Alap In Raga Bhairav
Raga Kerwani

Paul Horn, flute; Satya Dev Pawar, violin; Gopal Krishan, vichitra veena; Gopal Verma, tambura; Gaffar Hyder Khan, tabla; Vinay Bharat-Ram, vocals.

Raga Desh
Raga Bihag
Raga Vibhas
Raga Tilang
Alap
Manj-Khamaj
Raga Shivaranjani

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Raga Desh	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Raga Bihag	Adapted By – Ravi Shankar	April or May 1967
Raga Vibhas	Adapted By – Ravi Shankar	April or May 1967
Side Two
Raga Tilang	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Alap	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Manj-Khamaj	Adapted By – Allaudin Kahn	April or May 1967
Raga Shivaranjani	Adapted By – Ravi Shankar	April or May 1967
Side Three
Arti	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Raga Ahir Bhairao	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Tabla Solo In Teental	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Raga Puira Dhanashri	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Side Four
Alap In Raga Bhairav	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967
Raga Kerwani	Adapted By – Paul Horn	April or May 1967

Liner Notes

PAUL HORN

Paul Horn was one of the most commercially successful jazz musicians in America when he journeyed to India late in 1966. He was a top studio reedman in Los Angeles; had coached Tony Curtis for musician roles in some Like It Hot and Wild and Wonderful and appeared himself in The Rat Race and The Sweet Smell of Success; was the subject of a David Wolper film documentary, Portrait of a Jazz Musician; led his own quintets and made his own records, including a much acclaimed jazz mass written for him by Lalo Schiffrin. It is true that Leonard Feather had written of Horn's tenure with the Chico Hamilton quintet that he was "a very fluent, if not always impassioned soloist," but could a man who worked as much and lived as well as Horn did be impassioned all the time?

Maybe not, but something was wrong. Horn was by nature an impassioned man, and the daily routine of anonymous studio playing and Hollywood partying was beginning to pall. Later, he remembered that the years 1965-66 were "a time in my life when confusion, frustration, and chaos reigned supreme. I wasn't enjoying what I was doing, and I guess I had been hiding it from myself for a good many years. Even when I had to face the fact that I wasn't happy, I couldn't quite figure out why. I was doing pretty well, doing the things I'd set out to do, making pretty good money, had records out. Why wasn't I enjoying it?"

Why indeed. More than a few Americans were discovering during those years that material well-being and goal achievement did not automatically insure inner quietness and satisfaction. The music reflected this situation. In jazz, hardening forms were becoming formulas and the solutions being proposed during the early sixties, by Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, seemed prohibitively radical to many musicians. In popular music, manufactured pseudo-teen fare was dominant, the sensual vitality of fifties rock 'n' roll having all but disappeared. In the world of serious" music, the hegemony of the Vienna serialists and the great neo-romantic Stravinsky was crumbling, and nobody but a few apparent madmen (Cage, Partch) seemed to be innovating. But at the same time fresh developments were occurring in all these areas of American music, and in each case the influence of music from the East was crucially important.

If any one figure was primarily responsible for introducing Westerners to the East's ancient musical verities, it was undoubtedly the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. La Monte Young and Terry Riley, who started an entirely new school of American composition during the sixties, have testified that the first recordings of Indian music to reach them were of Ravi Shankar, and that these recordings changed their lives. Shankar's recordings influenced John Coltrane's move toward the East, a move which had repercussions in popular music during the late sixties with the emergence of Shankar and Coltrane-inspired "raga rock."

Paul Horn was touched directly by Shankar. When the Indian musician visited Los Angeles in the fall of 1965, it was Horn who introduced him to some of the more prominent L.A. musicians, and when Shankar began working on his Portrait of Genius album, he picked Horn to play fluze. According to Richard Bock, who produced that lp for World Pacific, "Paul was delighted to accept, but he was apprehensive about such an unusual musical undertaking. Ravi assured him that he would teach him what he would need to know to adapt himself quickly to the Indian style of music. Paul quickly caught the spirit of the music and sensitively performed under Shankar's direction. This meeting had a profound effect on Paul Horn's future, both musically and spiritually. Soon after the recording, Paul began studying Indian music with one of Ravi Shankar's pupils, Harihar Racy Later he became an initiate of India's great saint, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and began to practice this great master's system of meditation."

Transcendental Meditation, TM for short. had been introduced in Los Angeles as early as 1958. Bock learned the technique — and it is a technique that's learned, not a belief system or religion — in1961, and Horn became attracted to it early in 1966 through the efforts of his friend Henry Lewy, an audio engineer who now works regularly with Joni Mitchell. "In a few weeks," Horn wrote later, "I was given personal instruction into the technique and immediately felt the great release of tension and increased energy in my daily life." In September, Horn met the Maharishi during the latter's eighth visit to L.A. and asked him for permission to attend a four-month-long course designed to train teachers of TM, which Maharishi held annually at his academy in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges in the Himalayan foothills. Horn had been practicing meditation a comparatively short time, but Maharishi accepted him and "on December 27, 1966, I was on my way to India and the greatest, most fantastic experience of my life." When the four months were over, Horn had become one of the first twelve teachers of TM in the United States, and he had recorded the two lp's which comprise this package.

Before proceeding to the music and the circumstances of its recordings, we might do well to clear up certain questions which many readers will be asking. Didn't TM go out of fashion with flower power during the late sixties? Surely Paul Horn eventually decided that making it in L.A. wasn't so bad after all and forgot about Maharishi, inner peace, and jazz ragas? The answers are surprising. First, the flirtation of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and other pop stars with the Maharishi and TM during the late sixties was the beginning of the movement, not its end. Some people were no doubt attracted to the practice of TM because it was temporarily hip, but those who approached it seriously have by and large stayed with it, and new meditators continue to learn the technique, hundreds every week in the New York area alone. Furthermore, support for the validity of the technique has come from an unexpected quarter, the scientific community. Research published in Scientific American, Lancet, and other reputable periodicals indicates that TM actually does relieve tension and promote increased energy, by radically slowing the metabolism during the few minutes per day during which it is practiced and thus giving the meditator periods of a kind of rest which is measurably deeper than the deepest sleep.

Horn continues to practice and teach TM. But it is not a miracle cure, and Horn did not return to Los Angeles from India ready to readjust to the life of a celebrity sessionman. "I was still doing studio work," he recalled eight years later, "but I felt really alienated from the whole scene. I stayed another year and a half, but I was spending more time on the beach and out on tour with my group, and less in the studios. Then we played a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, I went over to Victoria (Vancouver Island) to do a lecture on meditation, and I liked the feeling there. I had been wondering what to do for four years, and then and there I decided to move to Canada. I didn't have anything lined up, and Victoria wasn't exactly the musical center of the world, but I wasn't worried about it. I just wanted to live in an environment where I felt comfortable."

I visited Paul at his home outside Victoria in 1974, and it was immediately evident that the move had worked out splendidly. He still flew into L.A. from time to time for special projects (recording his own albums or making very occasional guest appearances such as his solos on Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon), but mostly he played and put on concerts around Vancouver, hosted a television show which featured his quintet and guests, scored films, and toured, "Sometimes we play really small towns," he said, "and the audiences are just as appreciative, if not more so. We play the same music we'd play in a big city and prove to ourselves again that people are people, big town, small town, India, Canada, U.S.A. If they feel the music they're going to respond to it, and that's universal."

Did Horn miss the busy pace of L.A.? "I'm playing more here than I was there," he said, "and doing more things that I like." Some of those likeable things included looking out a picture window at the Pacific while Coltrane's Transition or Stevie Wonder's Innervisions filled the spacious living room; playing clarinet through an echoplex in the bare, functional practice room upstairs while dolphins leapfrogged over each other in the water outside; and playing flute for and with killer whales at a nearby aquarium where, Horn emphasized, "they're right in the ocean water, and there's only a net separating them from the ocean. A marine biologist there had been playing recordings for them and found out they were selective; some music they liked and would give their attention to repeatedly, other music they ignored, If they were really moved they would make sounds through their blowholes in answer to what was going on, definite answers to musical phrases. I started playing with them and found that if I played something and waited, they would answer. Then the next phrase they'd answer with a different type of sound, different curve, different length, different pitches. Of course, their hearing goes over 200,000 cycles, so whatever we're hearing is only a tenth of what they're capable of producing and responding to." Soon the whales were responding to Horn's music by rising out of the water and beaching themselves on the lip of the tank whenever he sat down and began to play.

If there was anything wrong with Paul Horn's life in Canada, it was the fact that his busy schedule kept him from returning to India. "I sure would like to go back," he said, "I don't like the poverty, of course, but if you're there and see the whole situation, one thing that has maintained itself is that people have time to care for each other. Here in the West, there's really very little communication going on between people. We're a product of that, and not knowing anything different we accept it. But in India you can see free. spontaneous communication, and that's a thing you can never forget. In Delhi, for example, you find yourself talking to the doorman at your hotel for three hours, and you're really interested in what he's saying, because he's discussing Indian art and Indian music like a connoisseur. Everybody in that country knows about their art and music. That's why, when Ravi Shankar or Ali Akbar Khan play a concert for an Indian audience, it's completely different than a concert in America. It's like if a jazz musician played and everybody really knew what he was doing, phrase by phrase. It's like jazz in that when a guy finishes a solo they give him a hand. But during that solo there's continuous improvisation, one idea after another, and Indian audiences respond continuously, on two levels, emotionally and technically. If the soloist does something from the heart, they all go, ahhh, and they do it in unison, just as if you'd given a downbeat. If he does something that's extremely difficult technically and makes it, they say, dahh, again in unison. These are just ordinary people, even beggars off the street. That's one reason why, in India, you see poverty, but you don't see misery. A guy is sleeping out in the street, and at first you're horrified, but when you see him the next day he doesn't have any tension lines in his face, he's laughing. He may have to beg for food, but he doesn't go around all day thinking how miserable he is.

"To the Western mind, the first two weeks it shocks the hell out of you. Then you start settling in and you see what's happening there. You know, the atmosphere is so gentle that the birds are always flying around you, You'll be in somebody's office, the windows will be wide open, and birds will be flying in, around the guy's desk, and out again. You'll be sitting at a lunch counter, and the birds will be sitting there next to you eating the sugar. There's a whole vibration there where they don't fear human beings. Did you ever see anything like that in L.A. or New York? There were times when I loved living in the center of L.A., and I was born in Manhattan, But I went to India and my values shifted; something changed in my life, and I had to go with that change." India meant musical as well as spiritual expansion, La Monte Young is one of many classically trained American musicians and composers who insist that "Indian music has the highest performance standards of any system in the world. And the frequency relationships are all associated with psychological states. The mere fact that they have the means to classify the moods of the different ragas, in whatever poetic way, means that they have something that has almost totally disappeared from Western music."

Current theories of hearing explain how the strictly sequential repetition of tones in a raga (a raga being a mode-form which dictates not only the intervals to be used but their sequence in both ascending and descending configurations) plays upon the mind. Since different tones stimulate different areas of the basilar membrane in the inner ear, the membrane will be rhythmically 'massaged" when the tones repeat in the same patterns. And, since each area of the membrane is connected to specific neurons, which fire messages along specific neural pathways toward specific parts of the cerebral cortex, an accurately played raga will have an effect which is well-defined and repeatable. It will actually be able to trigger certain moods and, perhaps, to insinuate itself more harmoniously into the listener's metabolism when played in its proper setting, at its proper time of day. The Indian system which details these musico-physiological correspondences has been tested and refined over thousands of years, while the actual practice of music has been handed down through an unbroken chain of guru-disciple relationships. Furthermore, while Western equal temperament is based on an arbitrary subdivision of the octave, the Indians divide the octave according to the immutable natural laws of the harmonic series, and this Indian division of the octave recognizes 22 shrutis or semi-tones for every twelve tones in the Western system, plus an almost unlimited number of microtonal grace notes and other precise pitch-shadings. Musical masters in India can distinguish pitch gradations so minute that Western musicologists are able to measure them only with the help of mechanical and electronic paraphernalia. When this precision goes hand in hand with improvisation and deep feeling, as it does in all the best performances of Indian music, the results are unlike any other musical experience on earth.

Given the depth and purity of this tradition, it would be unwise to expect a meeting between a jazz flautist and a group of Indian musicians to produce anything like a jazz/ raga fusion. Rather, this is an album of Indian music, performed by Indians with an American guest. Horn improvises within the Indian system, carefully observing rules of ascending and descending sequence and, as far as is possible on the European flute, Indian strictures regarding the bending of notes. He does so with remarkable success; a very fine flautist who recently heard these performances for the first time was sure Horn was performing on an Indian flute, so closely does his playing resemble that of the classical bamboo flute master Panna Lal Ghosh. Not bad for a jazzman whose mother was Irving Berlin's pianist! But there is jazz here, especially in the way Horn makes personal, impassioned statements within the framework of Indian structures. A comment he made when I visited him in Victoria provides a clue to the manner in which he combines the two forms. "When there's space in music," he said, "it causes a feeling of settling. It means you have to wait, which can be a trance-like or meditative experience. Miles Davis first mentioned that to me a long time ago. He said, 'Most jazz musicians, they're playing all the time.' To me, and to Miles, at least in those days, the challenge was not to play all the notes you could play, but to wait, hesitate, let space become a part of the improvisation."

On, then, to the two records in this package, which, although they both maintain an even flow of peaceful energy and were both recorded in New Delhi around the same time, are products of very different sets of circumstances. The musicians featured on Sides One and Two were students of Ravi Shankar's, and it was Shankar himself who put Horn and Richard Bock in contact with them, suggested which ragas the group might play, and composed three original melodies based on ancient ragas especially for the lp, As for the instrumentation, the veena or vina is of course the most venerable stringed solo instrument in India; the sitar is essentially a smaller and simpler version of it. The other instruments are tabla (tuned drums) and tamboura, the stringed drone instrument which sets up a rich, continuous field of harmonic resonances, The principal soloists are Gopal Krishan, who was born in Delhi in 1926, studied under his father, Pt. Nand Kishore, Pt. Khubchand Chramchari, and Pt, Ravi Shankar, and joined the staff of All India Radio in 1948; Satya Dev Pawar, born in Jodhpur in 1934, a former student of Shankar and of Ali Akbar Khan, a court musician in the orchestra of the Maharaja of Jodhpur for five years and a member of the staff since 1954; and Horn, The vocalist on "Manj-Khamaj" is Vinay Bharat-Ram, a native of Delhi who studied social science at the University of Michigan and at Harvard, and Hindustani music under Ustad Allaudjn Khan, Ravi Shankar's master and Ali Akbar Khan's father.

"Raga Desh" is an evening melody depicting a melancholy mood, set to teental (sixteen beats). "Raga Bihag" is a late evening melody depicting a still, moonlit night, set to Roopaktala, 7 beats. "Raga Vibhas" is an early morning melody, set to Jhaptala (ten beats), "Raga Tilang" is "a light classical raga generally sung or played in the late evening," set to teental. The word means the atempo opening section of a raga exposition) is a free improvisation by Horn, with tamboura accompaniment. "Manj-Khamaj" is a "light classical piece known as thumri...The composition describes a playful situation between Radha and Krishna set to deepchandi tala, composed of 14 beats, "Raga Shivaranjani" is a melancholy evening raga set to teental.

Sides Three and Four feature Kashmiri musicians who were favorites of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to whom Horn dedicated the lp when it was originally issued. During the last month of his four-months'-long course in the teaching of meditation, Maharishi took Horn and his other pupils to Lake Dal, near Srinagar, Kashmir, where they all lived on houseboats "in one of the most beautiful valleys in the world, surrounded by snow-covered mountains of the great Himalayan range. During our stay there, we were entertained several times by some excellent Kashmir musicians, who had come each year to play for Maharishi and were all meditators themselves. It just so happened that I had my flute along and joined them at Maharishi's request...I mentioned to Maharishi my desire to make a record with these musicians and have the rest of the world hear their fine talents. Nothing more was said. Then one evening two weeks later I was called to Maharishi's room. There sitting on the floor at Maharishi's feet were the assembled musicians. He proceeded to plan an album with the insight of an experienced record producer."

The opening "Arti" is performed by flute, dilruba, and sitar. (According to H. A. Popley's The Music of India, the dilruba "is very much like a sitar, but smaller, and instead of a bowl, it has a belly, covered with sheep-parchment. In shape it is something like the sarangi, and like that instrument it is played with a bow made of horsehair. It has...only the four main strings, and not the extra three. The dilruba is made, as a rule, with twenty-two sympathetic strings under the main strings.") Horn wrote of "Arti" that it "is one of the most popular religious songs of India and is performed both at dawn and dusk, It is sung as a prayer in chauks (courtyards in front of temples) and in homes. Its rhythmic cycle is eight beats (kehrewa) and it has two sections, 'asthai' and 'antara.'"

"Raga Ahir Bhairao," performed with the same instrumentation, "portrays a tragic mood in teental (16 beats) of medium tempo. The time of performance is in the early morning from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m," Rajinder Raina's "Tabla Solo in Teental" is self-explanatory; the drummer recites some of the beats before playing them. "Raga Puira Dhanashri" is an early evening raga with a tragic mood, in teental. "Alap in Raga Bhairav" is like the "Alap" on Side Two, an improvisation by Horn. The closing "Raga Kenvan" is a night raga for the hours 9 p.m. to midnight, in teental, Its mood "is one of praise of beauty and nature."

ROBERT PALMER
Robert Palmer writes on music for The New York Times and is a Contributing Editor with Rolling Stone and Downbeat.