In a way, Wise and Otherwise, a very natural sounding
expression of East meets West, has been waiting 40 years to be realized.
While the music listener of the last decade is more accustomed and so
perhaps more open now to such blends, it's been a rather long journey as
East Indian music slowly wended its course into Western music. As
classical Indian music has been around for several thousand years, forty
years must seem like a quick blink of the eye to some. This is not
meant as a studied treatise, but just a sketched outline, a quick pop
history traced back to the possible origins, where the timeline takes us
back to several years before George Harrison had even heard of Ravi
Shankar or the Beatles got their mantras.
In the very early 1960s, nearly unnoticed in the Berkeley music
communes and rooming houses, Robbie Basho was rumored to eat woodrose
and play his then strange guitar music all night, using his strings as
drones to propel him into the interior of the OM. His roommates would
try to sleep through the contact highs they got from him.
Simultaneously, Sandy Bull was actively on a quest for his musical guru,
and when the student was ready, the teacher appeared in the form of
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, with whom Bull studied for the remainder of his
life.
Then about 1965-1966, the Beach Boys, or maybe it was the Beatles,
brushed the strings of "an Indian guitar" (a sitar) once or twice on a
pop release. A few more such accents were placed on popular records
here and there during that era. Jimi Hendrix was so genuinely
enraptured with the idea of incorporating sitar into his music, he held
a summit meeting with an Indian musician; Hendrix didn't live long
enough to pursue his ideas, but the other musician went off to record a
brief exploration of Jimi's music on his sitar.
There was an ongoing fascination, though some musicians were
recognizably more dedicated in their pursuits. Many English and
American musicians made the arduous trek to India in the '70s to be
introduced to some of the innumerable scales necessary to begin singing
or playing an Indian instrument and learned there were really no
shortcuts to this process. So it was the tabla slipped into occasional
use in Western pop music before the stringed instruments did, and Ry
Cooder slid his steel around tabla-powered rhythms on several early
blues-based pieces (Performance, 1971 and Boomer's Story,
1972.)
And then there was nothing too much until this world music thing
started happening. Now, fusions of rock and sitar are regular
offerings, and some (like those of Ashwin Batish) should probably be
listened to.
This is a long way of saying there were plenty who have tried; some
were more successful in their integration than others and those clearly
were the more serious students. Of the musicians who dedicated
themselves to years of respectful study, Harry Manx has emerged to offer
an intriguing presentation.
Manx started out as a roadie for Willie Dixon and then traveled the
world for twenty-five years as a one-man-band. While he was in Japan in
the '80s, he heard the music of Vishna Mohan Bhatt. That encounter
eventually lured him to India to study for five years with Bhatt, the
inventor of an instrument called the Mohan Veena. Bhatt is quite well
known in India. Manx also toured with Bhatt, performing with him in
concert in front of 8,000 people at the Taj Mahal. Soon, Bhatt became
more famous to Westerners from his 1994 recording with Ry Cooder,
Meeting By the River.
Yet, aside from Manx, the only other Westerner who ever played or
owned a Veena was George Harrison. As both Manx and Harrison had an
understanding and appreciation of his music, Bhatt presented each of
those two disciples with an instrument. Lately, there's been a lot of
talk about power rock and power sitar. But keep in mind that the strings
of the Veena, which is like a 20-stringed lap slide guitar, are
maintained at a tension of 500 lbs. total. So there is a lot of
potential power even at rest.
What Manx manages to come up with on Wise and Otherwise is a
combination of gentler folk forms. He's a good singer and very adept on
regular slide guitar, as shown on "Only Then Will Your House Be Blessed"
which only made me want to hear him playing more of those very
expressive blues.
If you're antsy to hear him play the Veena, you have only to wait
until the second track for "Death Have Mercy". Manx also pays homage to
the sixties, when sitar power was a popular experimentation if only an
aspiration not fully realized then. Although Jimi Hendrix is remembered
with "Foxy Lady", the most evocative piece is a cover of Van Morrison's
"Crazy Love". The unlikeliest segue is "The Gist of Madhuvanti" blending
into an acoustic version of B.B. King's "The Thrill is Gone", but that
ends up as the sparkling centerpiece.
As an able songwriter, Manx also recounts the story of an old friend
("an honest man on the welfare line") who slipped through the cracks of
society on "Coat of Mail". Wise and Otherwise gains with each
listening, and that is always an intriguing phenomenon. Manx is not
really, as so many seem to insist, playing "the blues" . . . at least not in
my book. But this all seems to work together a little better than it by
all rights should.
Great music for slowing down at the end of a day, and perfect for an
intimate gathering of laid-back friends.
— 20 June 2002
