A meeting of East and West doesn\u2019t get more exciting than on Passages<\/i>. The collaboration between a minimalist music composer (Philip Glass) and a sitar player (Ravi Shankar) could yield myriads of possibilities, but nothing as easily accessible to the most casual of listeners as this one. Glass has toned down his longwinded, repetitive composition style to a point where even the album\u2019s eight-minute long compositions are in fact woven in dense layers, not succumbing to his usual flair of rhythmically hammering one solitary note repeatedly. A middle ground is also sought by Ravi Shankar, who infuses elements of Indian classical music, mostly as a part of the greater musical landscape and not as a solitary force basking all by itself in the limelight.<\/p>\n
Because of how the music is approached, Passages <\/i>is comparable to an experiment with world music by a pop\/rock musician in that it looks for influences outside of the expertise of its eminent composers with the na\u00efvet\u00e9 of a budding musician. It even makes Peter Gabriel\u2019s Passion<\/i> seem difficult and stuck-up. \u201cOffering,\u201d stripped of any Indian instruments, has a pleasantly Gothic saxophone and string arrangement, none too gloomy, but ironic in a \u201cSix Feet Under\u201d sort of way. \u201cMeetings Along The Edge,\u201d another track devoid of Indian instrumentation, has the strings pulsating with the rhythm of a Philip Glass composition and the aggression of an electronic cut while still being instantly catchy. Another \u201cWestern\u201d track, \u201cChannels And Winds,\u201d with its Gothic vocals, is almost theatrical in its grandiosity.<\/p>\n
One of the more traditional songs on the record is \u201cSadhanipa,\u201d where Shankar\u2019s sitar solo dominates the music with an accompanying Indian percussion instrument, the tabla. The haunting ambient trumpet intro and outro add a mystique to this relatively straightforward cut; they are only testament to the album\u2019s enthusiasm to look for ideas that are far apart from each other and bring them together in blissful cohesion. <\/p>\n
Although on most numbers, influences of one or the other \u2013 Western or Indian \u2013 play their part rather quietly, on \u201cRagas In Minor Scale,\u201d they both play the lead roles, resulting in a beautiful jamming of Indian instruments to Glass\u2019 rhythmic meters. This compositional brilliance comes to climax on the closing cut \u201cPrashanti.\u201d Running just under 14 minutes, this magnum opus of the album flows like a story being told, with calming music at the beginning that explodes into chaos in the middle, finally giving way to ethereal chanting vocals in Hindi that plead for peace, ending the track\u2019s dramatic journey begging for harmony in this world full of ills.<\/p>\n
How masterfully Passages<\/i> brings together disparate elements to create a rich vibrancy without sacrificing a degree of simplicity that doesn\u2019t require a highly-tuned and sophisticated musical palate makes it a record for the masses, and a work that is in a league of its own. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":30012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8444],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41642","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ravi-shankar-and-philip-glass","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41642"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}