Jul 212010
George Harrison got nothin’ on this baby!
You may recall an ongoing aesthetic scuffle over the mystery of Joanna Newsom‘s appeal and whether the harp actually holds any value in rock ‘n roll. As part of the possible “flavor of the month” perspective on this issue, we wondered who was rock’s second-best sitar player. Well, wonder and ye shall find an answer on Rock Town Hall. Clearly it’s Ananda Shankar, nephew of Ravi!
Ananda Shankar, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
I stumbled on this track while downloading tracks from eMusic from a pretty cool compilation, entitled What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967-1977). A physical copy of that CD goes for a steep price on Amazon, but you can get an entire album of rock’s second-best sitar player…after the jump!
Wow, that’s… something else.
Yeah I got What It Is! from emusic too. Very groovy.
Not to hijack your thread or anything, but a Facebook friend pointed me to this yesterday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxpfBWMOlOk
Does our resident Stones expert 2000man or anyone else know what this is? It’s clearly not exactly ‘live,’ but it’s also not the canonical recording of Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
Yes.
BigSteve, I know this version from bootlegs as an alternate take; at minimum it is an alternate vocal and different mix of the backing. On a lot of the Stone’s promo videos, well into the 70s, the used the basic backing track from the album and Mick did the vocals live. I don’t think that is quite what is going on here, this is rather different.
BigSteve, feel free to hijack this thread. It’s main point was to have a little chuckle over some old debates as well as to encourage people to check out that groovy comp that you can download from eMusic. Thanks.
Cornershop had a sitar player, and there’s sitar on their hit Brimful of Asha. According to Wikipedia:
“Their next official Cornershop release was the 2002 album, Handcream for a Generation, which featured Noel Gallagher on sitar.”
Does that make Noel Rock’s Fourth-Greatest Sitar Player?
According to a recent article in Mojo, Lowell George of Little Feat learned to play sitar at a school run by Ravi Shankar and was quite an accomplished player.
I’m pretty sure that’s Bernard Purdie playing drums on the Ananda Shankar version.
Can I get a witness for Tom Dawes of frat-psych powerhouse The Cyrkle?
plasticsun made me spit my water.
plasticsun nailed it!