The one hundred eleventh album: #111 Ravi Shankar - The Sounds of India
For a real change, today I listened to an album of Indian music. Ravi Shankar introduces each piece explaining the music, how it evolves and how it changes, and the context helps me appreciate a bit more what they're actually doing.
With the focus of the music being different, it sounds more supporting - not background music, but not something I felt I focused on as a single thing. It would work as a performance and worked to get me in a mind set - more energetic than that might imply, because of the speed and rhythm changes. The improvisations are compared, to some extent, to jazz on the album, and it does feel similar to that - a basic number that they play around with and extrapolate from. It's good to hear some different music and this was especially worth it, even aside from the influence it has on psychedelic rock after this.