George Harrison/Ravi Shankar - Collaborations

George Harrison/Ravi Shankar - Collaborations

2010, Dark Horse Records/Rhino Entertainment

In honor of Ravi Shankar's 90th birthday, Dark House Records has released a limited edition box set entitled Collaborations, documenting the studio and live work the pair collaborated on starting in 1973 and on-and-off in the late 1990's.  The numbered, limited edition collection includes three classic Ravi Shankar albums, a 56-page book with foreword by Philip Glass and a numbered certificate. 

Collaborations includes the 1974 album Shankar Family & Friends, 1976's The Ravi Shankar Music Festival From India and the 1997 album Chants Of India.  Also included is a DVD featuring a concert performance of Ravi Shankar's Music Festival From India recorded at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1974.  The most compelling album here is Shankar's first, Shankar Family & Friends, which not only features Ustad Alla Rakha, Lakshmi Shankar and Shivkumar Sharma, but also Harrison, Ringo Starr, Tom Scott, Billy Preston, Klaus Voorman and Jim Keltner. 

Skepticism aside, Collaborations is really a collector's piece.  The draw here is the lack of availability of Shankar's music.  Music Festival From India and Shankar Family & Friends have never before appeared on CD, each having been out of print for thirty years or more.  Chants Of India sold over 100,000 copies on its release in 1997 but has been out of print for five years now.  The live performance of Ravi Shankar’s Music Festival From India has never before been released, and also features the audio of the concert remixed by Ravi and Anoushka in 5.1.  Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine the individual albums and concert not appearing in a year or so in standard, stand-alone editions.  This would make a great holiday gift for fans of Shankar or Harrison fans, and probably will have collector value as well.

Rating: 3 Stars (Out of 5) 

Learn more about Ravi Shankar at www.ravishankar.org.  Learn more about George Harrison and about Collaborations at www.georgeharrison.com.  Collaborations is available from Amazon.com as a Limited Edition Box Set or Audio Download.

Review: HB3 - The Veldt

HB3 - The Veldt
2007, Zegnotropic Records

HB3 is setting music free with a sound that combines organic electric instruments with electronic sounds and effects in fashion that might just be unique. Bridging the gaps from Charlie Parker to Eric Johnson to Yes and through Ravi Shankar on the way back, HB3 paints with a broad musical brush that's as interesting as it is hard to predict. HB3's latest album, The Veldt, is loosely based on the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name. HB3 looks to create a musical place of pure imagination and creativity both as a refuge from the world and a means to understand it.

The Veldt opens with Overture (Behold The Sea), sounding a bit like Mannheim Steamroller with Eric Johnson on guitar and Rick Wakeman sitting in on keys. Keyboard, guitar and piccolo bass pass the major and minor themes back and forth in a composition with theatrical implications. Pay Me Pray Me is described by HB3 as a prayer to Eros; the song itself is hard to decipher on the lyric side but plays like a very repressed alt-rocker with progressive tendencies in the chorus. The Veldt plays off of African rhythms and a somewhat demented bit of song construction to create a fantastical vision that crosses cultural and musical boundaries with each sonic breath. Perhaps the most interesting interlude in the song is a bass solo that sounds like it has been amplified with some electronic effects.

Casual Betrayal sews together threads of Brit Rock, Folk and 1980's keyboard-driven New Wave; the song explores the lack of honor in modern society and how it is passed from generation to the next like a social disease. HB3 manages to sound quite a lot like 54-40's Neil Osborne on this track. Manimal! combines Hip-Hop and Electronica with Horror-movie style themes. Manimal! is all over the musical map and is better heard than described. Harmonium takes Dennis DeYoung-style keyboard work (you might pick out distinct similarities to the opening of Fooling Yourself) and builds into something reminiscent of some of the experimental soundtrack work of the late 1980's. Fans of Giorgio Moroder will find themselves on familiar territory for much of the song.

On 007, HB3 pays tribute to Isao Tomita with a composition that runs the gamut Sci-Fi and Space Age novelty. Computers and spaceships as they may have been sonically imagined in the 1960's and 1970's reign here. Close But No Cigar is one of the most intriguing compositions here; I spent a dozen or so trips through this song trying to come up with a "sounds like" comparison and couldn't find anything that quite fit. The closest I came is to think of Pink Floyd as produced by William Ackerman. The Veldt closes out with Lion & Lamb which turns out to be something of a musical reprise of the entire album, in turns. Most or all of the major thematic elements of the individual songs come back in Lion & Lamb; a sort of musical yang and yin that compels the album while drawing all of the pieces together.

It's rare to come across a recording that's wholly original. HB3 achieves this not by fearing or shunning his influences, but by embracing them wholeheartedly and using them to loving create new ideas with old phrases. In a medium governed by eight basic notes it is often the music musicians themselves consume that drives their creations. HB3 takes all of these musical ideas that have entered his mind over the years and resets them as something wholly new and original. The Veldt is brilliant.

Rating: 4.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about HB3 at http://www.hb3.com/ or www.myspace.com/fromthelaboratory. You can purchase The Veldt as either CD or download at CDBaby.com.