Concerts: Utter Joy Uninhibited

"If I may say so without offending anyone," says Sitarist Ravi Shankar with a definite air of passive insistence, "in the United States people are too much used to things being sold, to publicity. Something comes in the air — a yoyo, Tiny Tim, Nehru shirts, transcendentalism — and people go all out for it. When there is something else, they turn their face. It hurts me to see people being so fickle."

Shankar should know. After the Beatles introduced the resonant sound of the stringed sitar to rock in Norwegian Wood (1965)...

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