Pandit Pran Nath - Raga Cycle, Palace Theatre, Paris 1972 (rel. 2006)

We're long overdue some raga goodness from the master Kirana singer on these pages.  Compared to the album release from the previous year (posted here), this brief live recording sets the accompanying instruments (played by Pran Nath's US students Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela) a bit further back in the mix, so that you appreciate all the better how that wonderful voice finds its way "in between the notes".

This archival release came out on Terry Riley's label in 2006, and in fact represents only a small excerpt of the ambitious Raga Cycle that the players undertook in Paris in May 1972: performing the 'night ragas' (those intended for playing at night) on a Friday night, the 'day ragas' on the Saturday, and the 'morning ragas' on the Sunday morning.  Raga Shudh Sarang and the brief Raga Kut Todi, featured here, are both late-morning ragas (from my admittedly limited research on the fascinatingly complex rules of Indian classical music), so must have been from the Sunday morning concert.  Wonder if Riley or Young have any more in their archives?

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Pandit Pran Nath - Ragas (1971)

Listened to this back-to-back with the Glass/Schleiermacher album (see previous post) the other day for maximum mindwarp whilst walking home in the sunshine, so made sense to close out the week by posting these two spellbinding ragas.

Pran Nath's life story is fascinating, and I highly recommend reading up - for starters, here's a short wiki article and a fascinating albeit lengthy essay.  But all I'm going to do today is share the music - an eternal twin-tambura drone (one of the players being uber-minimalist La Monte Young) reverberating through every cell in your body from the first second, and that voice... that voice.  Whether pouring down like honey around the exacting, complex notes and modes proscribed to each raga, or rising in ecstatic spiritual release towards the end of each piece, this is a voice I could listen to forever.

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