Within You Without You: George Harrison and a Popular Dialogue among Civilizations
Mid-late 1960s: West goes East. While it was John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Canada that initiated Rock n' Roll Diplomacy, George Harrison was the first to apply that concept to music.
Through Harrison, The Beatles were the first Western Rock band to use non-Western instruments. Having been intrigued by the sound of a Sitar during the filming of Help!, Harrison went on to learn how to play it with Ravi Shankar. Harrison would first play the Sitar on the introduction to the ballad "Norwegian Wood" (1965) - prompting the Rolling Stones to follow suit in "Paint it Black."
While playing short Indian instrument passages on Beatles tracks, such as "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Strawberry Fields Forever", Harrison went one step further by convincing his band-members to expand their repertoire by including tracks in which he sang to Indian instruments: from the cynical "Love You To" (1966), to the cosmic "http://www.thebeatles.com/song/within-you-without-you" (1967), and the transcendental "The Inner Light" (1968).
Harrison would also produce, in Bombay and London, Wonderwall Music, the soundtrack of the homonymous movie, combining Indian compositions with psychedelic Rock. Thereafter, during the Beatles' post Sergeant Pepper depression, Harrison would lead the band to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Himalayan ashram, in the foothills of the Ganges, to study transcendental meditation. There, they would conceptualize the Beatles' third and last segment (1968-69): The White Album, Let it Be and Abbey Road, during which time Harrison's Electronic Sound would also pioneer in the field of electronic music.
By: Hirad Abtahi
Source: Huffington Post
