Music: Sitar Player

Clad in high-collared vests and baggy cotton trousers, the three barefoot Indian musicians sat down cross-legged on an Oriental carpet on the stage of Judson Memorial Hall at Manhattan's Washington Square. Glancing at the drummer to the right of him, Ravi Shankar cradled his sitar in his arms, and with slender, agile fingers began to coax from its steel strings a piercingly plaintive, twangy melody. Beside him the tabla (drum) thrummed and rataplanned a shifting, syncopated beat, and behind him a four-stringed, unfretted lute named the tamboura thinly droned its hypnotic accompaniment. Thus...

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