There were the Beats, with their inter­est in Bud­dhism and East­ern phi­los­o­phy. Then the Bea­t­les and Rolling Stones mined East­ern music and tra­di­tions for their psy­che­del­ic head trips, and turned a lot of peo­ple on to the sitar and the Nehru jack­et. But in many sig­nif­i­cant East meets West moments, the empha­sis skewed heav­i­ly toward West­ern artists. These cul­tur­al moments cre­at­ed some tru­ly inspired rock and roll and writ­ing, but not much in the way of a gen­uine con­gress of artists of equal recog­ni­tion.

Though we might expect to find some­thing like this in the Col­lab­o­ra­tions box set, cred­it­ed to Ravi Shankar and George Har­ri­son, what we get instead are four discs of most­ly Shankar com­po­si­tions and clas­si­cal Indi­an inter­pre­ta­tions, which Har­ri­son pro­duced and played on as a guest artist. These albums refresh­ing­ly reverse the usu­al dynam­ic: “The music here,” writes the Bea­t­les Bible, “is far from West­ern pop musi­cians dab­bling with sitars in the 1960s.” But for a tru­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive work, we should look else­where, and we’ll per­haps find few fin­er exam­ples than Shankar’s work with Philip Glass.

The two giants of their respec­tive musi­cal worlds first met in Paris in 1965, but it was only 25 years lat­er that they decid­ed to work togeth­er on an album. You can hear the result, Pas­sages, at the top of the post and in the Spo­ti­fy playlist just above. Although it took over two decades for Glass and Shankar to record togeth­er, their col­lab­o­ra­tion began even “before The Bea­t­les had met Ravi,” remem­bered Glass in a lec­ture at the Red Bull Music Acad­e­my. “This music would’ve been very exot­ic, at that time… in the ‘60s, this was the first time this kind of music had been heard. At least in the West.”

In his mid-twen­ties at the time, Glass was hired to tran­scribe Shankar’s score for the cult film Chap­paqua. He began to com­bine what he had been learn­ing in his master’s pro­gram at Juil­liard “with the work I had been doing with Ravi Shankar. Almost imme­di­ate­ly I began doing that.” And so audi­ences heard Shankar’s influ­ence on West­ern min­i­mal­ism before they heard it in pop music. “It was through Shankar’s music,” NPR notes, “that the Amer­i­can com­pos­er came to real­ize that music could be con­struct­ed with rhythm as its very foun­da­tion…. That real­iza­tion became a cor­ner­stone of Glass’ own work.”

Since his first meet­ing with Glass, Shankar influ­enced and col­lab­o­rat­ed with many oth­er West­ern musi­cians in his long and var­ied career, inspir­ing John Coltrane and oth­er jazz greats and releas­ing three albums with vio­lin­ist Yehu­di Menuhin, each called West Meets East, in 1967, 1968, and 1976. Pas­sages is a shar­ing of both musi­cal vocab­u­lar­ies and com­po­si­tion­al meth­ods: Shankar and Glass each com­posed themes that the oth­er arranged. “There is a great deal of tech­ni­cal data involved here,” writes Jim Bren­holts at All­mu­sic. “Both of these artists have long tak­en intel­lec­tu­al approach­es to music.”

The­o­ry aside, “the music is bril­liant,” whether we under­stand its vir­tu­os­i­ty or not, though it trends large­ly in a sym­phon­ic direc­tion. Those inter­est­ed in a more beat-ori­ent­ed but also bril­liant “East meets West” col­lab­o­ra­tion would do well to check out table play­er Zakir Hus­sain and bassist Bill Laswell’s project Tabla Beat Sci­ence, which, All­mu­sic writes, fus­es the “rich and time-hon­ored tra­di­tion of the tabla” with “con­tem­po­rary elec­tron­i­ca stu­dio wiz­ardry.” And, of course, don’t miss Hus­sain’s work with gui­tarist extra­or­di­naire John McLaugh­lin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ravi Shankar Gives George Har­ri­son a Sitar Les­son … and Oth­er Vin­tage Footage

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Watch “Geom­e­try of Cir­cles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Sta­bil­i­ty or cul­tur­al vital­i­ty: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the oth­er. The Repub­lic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a tur­bu­lent his­to­ry, yet its musi­cians have also enjoyed roles as “pio­neers in the cre­ation of African pop­u­lar music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne’s Graeme Coun­sel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean cap­i­tal of Conakry on a mis­sion to pre­serve the great vari­ety of music, part of the tra­di­tion now broad­ly labeled “Afropop,” record­ed dur­ing the decades of state-spon­sored cul­tur­al abun­dance after the coun­try gained inde­pen­dence from France in 1958.

“Under the lead­er­ship of music lover Pres­i­dent Ahmed Sék­ou Touré,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, “the gov­ern­ment was soon send­ing out gui­tars, sax­o­phones, and brass instru­ments to 35 state-fund­ed pre­fec­ture orches­tras as part of a new authen­tic­ité pol­i­cy.

This direc­tive encour­aged a cul­tur­al revival that mixed tra­di­tion­al sounds with con­tem­po­rary music, par­tic­u­lar­ly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syli­phone, which record­ed and dis­trib­uted this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the pow­er­ful radio sig­nal of Radiod­if­fu­sion Télévi­sion Guinée (RTG) turned lis­ten­ers on to it well beyond the new coun­try’s bor­ders.

Coun­sel, already a col­lec­tor of Syli­phone records, dis­cov­ered dur­ing his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean gov­ern­ment still held a col­lec­tion of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery dur­ing an unsuc­cess­ful coup”). Apply­ing for and receiv­ing, ulti­mate­ly, three rounds of fund­ing from the British Library’s Endan­gered Archives Pro­gramme, he set about dig­i­tiz­ing and cat­a­loging the unex­pect­ed­ly numer­ous and per­haps expect­ed­ly dis­or­ga­nized and poor­ly main­tained reels of mag­net­ic tape he found, work­ing through bureau­crat­ic has­sles, coups d’é­tat, and even a mas­sacre.

“Noth­ing would deter me,” writes Coun­sel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the author­i­ties’ indif­fer­ence towards the sound archive, not the recal­ci­trance of their atti­tudes, nor the tragedies of every­day life in Guinea. Noth­ing.” The fruits of his labors have now become avail­able at the British Library’s online Syli­phone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks record­ed over 26 years. Meier names among the “leg­endary” music it makes avail­able “the loose rhythms of the Bem­beya Jazz Nation­al, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influ­enced beats of Orchestre de la Pail­lote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Ama­zones de Guinée.” Those musi­cians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a lit­tle time with the archive will guar­an­tee a long-term inabil­i­ty to get their songs out of your head.

Find the 8,000 record­ings here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing Is Rhythm

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.