1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 107. Shivkumar Sharma – Call of the Valley (1967-8)

 

This one is listed as released in 1967, but everything I’ve read about it suggests 1968, so I’m splitting the difference.

It’s a piece of Indian classical music, mainly traditional but using the non-traditional instruments of guitar and flute, and like the Ravi Shankar album involves using the ragas as its basis.

It tells the story, in music form, of a day in the life of a shepherd and his love, the shepherd represented by the guitar and the woman by the santoor, a kind of dulcimer, so the sound is different to Shankar’s sitar playing yet distinctly Indian. Meanwhile, the flute and the tablas play tunes based on traditional elements to signify the time of day, and the ongoing action, such as it is. Hey, we did Peter and the Wolf to death at school, I’m familiar with instrument motifs representing characters.

I think I probably missed some of this since it is recorded in stereo and I’m currently missing one ear-pod, so some of the spatial transitions that are supposed to be present, perhaps I missed. It’s also kind of hard to find an “authentic” version since it’s been re-released and remastered so many times over the years.

As with Shankar, it works well just letting it wash over you, and it gets very hypnotic after a while, but the middle track (Bhoop) is a frenetic piece; I’m guessing it’s when the man and woman meet and do a Bollywood style dance number to suggest other acts going on, but Manikrao Popatkar on the tabla is incredible. The speed increases, then increases again. And then increases again. This is 1968, there’s no looping or sampling, this is a man playing percussion faster than you’d think humanly possible, and a pretty complex pattern as well.
I don’t know if I’d come rushing back to listen to the music, but I do think I’ll try at least some of it again with proper stereo; I may also try a different version now that I know a bit more about what was published when.

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