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The Sitar! How did YOU start??? MELODIC INSTRUMENTS
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841 posts OM GUY 841 posts
OM GUY
lostandlau wrote:
I fell in hopelessly, stupidly in love with a worthless man who happened to own a horrendous and cheap sitar that he had bought while visiting India more than ten years ago. One day I asked to borrow it from him. As I fell more in love with playing the sitar, I fell more and more out of love with this man until one day I bought my own sitar and gave his sitar back to him. I haven't spoken to him since. I found a good teacher and have been studying the sitar for about two years now.
Well, look at it this way, it surely wasn't a total loss. You've got a better sitar... Plus, he's lucky that he got his axe back...in one lame piece..

All's well that ends well.
Let's hope 2016 is less violent and that people discover the soothing influence of ICM. Hari OM!
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trippy monkey 4,281 posts
trippy monkey
Not sure if we did this as a complete topic before but anyway.....We'll start with me...

From a very young age I was interested in animals, not that way you dirty buggers.
Then it went to prehistoric monsters & finally to fantasy characters.

I always loved Ray Harryhausen movies & in 1974 saw his Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. The dancing Kali sequence fascinated me no end & every time I heard Indian music, especially SITAR for some reason, it reminded me of this very scene where Tom Baker, to soon become the new Dr Who for the BBC BECAUSE someone there appreciated his expressive eyes, playing the evil magician Koura, brings the statue of the Hindu Goddess Kali to life & got it to perform a dance to Indian music. A FANTASTICAL magical sequence & one of Ray's faves I believe!!!

It eventually came to tv about 1980 where, after a few years of studying ICM, I realised it wasn't a sitar but the south Indian Saraswati veena playing along with tabla & tanpura.
Funnily enough it was a certain well known John Mayer, yes the father of our very own Jonathan Mayer here on the forums, who did the music for it. 'Small' J told me this when he came to visit me last year, his wife is from a town just around the corner from me in north England.

I went to the famous Lowry Theatre in Manchester a few years back for a 'Night With Ray Harryhausen' & what should appear in his selection of scenes showing his work but.... the Kali sequence. I nearly lept out of my seat as it's the first time I've seen it outside my house in 30 years!!!! The gorgeous booming tabla sound as the figure descends a flight of steps sent a massive shot of electricity down my spine. Even now!!!!

I DID ask Ray about it after the show as he showed some of us a few models & copies of his original drawings from some of his films. He said they had a little orchestra for it as the rest of the music was by the great Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa who did a wonderful job for the rest of the movie.
A special 2 disc CD has been released recently with, I presume, tracks on disc 2 of just the music from the soundtrack with the dance music added.

Well THAT'S how I got started on this MAD MAD journey, what about all you other loonies out there????

Nick
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fossesitar Senior Member 983 posts
fossesitar
My friend Jimmy Traweek (RIP) and I went on a world trek just after high school, meeting up in Tangiers (I had flown over before London, Paris, Madrid - caught a ride with a French Canadian dentist in his MGB all down the south of Spain, the Al-Hambra etc, freighter from Algicerez to Tangier), and after hitching across North Africa, boat to Sicily, hitched up into the boot of Italy over to Brindisi, freighter to Corfu, road on top of an Orange truck down through the mountains of Greece at night arriving at the Athens market 5am, I wanted to learn to write Arabic script (so beautiful) and though I would enroll in the American University at Bierut so after some down time in Athens I flew ahead buut unable to enroll mid-term. When Jimmy arrived Bierut we decided we would head to Jerusalem for Easter, went by way of Damascus picking up a German who spoke arabic along the way (Peter) and found a rockin hotel in the old section of Jerusalem with ceilings like a church, many beds dormitory style, one day Peter and Jimmy went out to the bazaar and on return brought an Afghan woman (later to become my wife), her 7 year-old son, her tall Austrian consiort, an Austrian woman and a Canadian babe - big party that night at which I played guitar in open tuning D-A-DD-A-D and next day Afghan woman says "I have a record you must hear", takes me to a record shop in the new section of town and pops it on - VK PLAYING PILOO WITH SHANTA PRASAD - absolutely floored, once I headed east with the afghan woman and her son we ended up in Pakistan where I got a job as guitar-player in residence for Radio Pakistan ("ASPRO" commercials plus a movie set !!) and got my forst sitar demonstration lesson from the chief sitar player for radio Pakistan, had my first sitar made in Lahore in our way to Kabul Afghanistan - that is the short version
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fossesitar Senior Member 983 posts
fossesitar
Since nobody else is adding their experiences I will expand mine to include my very first sitar lesson in Karachi Pakistan in early 1964. The Afghan babe was a very talented artist and dancer, we made our way across Arabia by going into nightclubs and restaurants, usually going table to table, some nights she would do portraits, other nights I would sing (sang "Greenback Dollar" for King Hussein of Jordan on the beach in Eilat as he returned from water skiing).

In Teheran, we were made exceptionally welcome by the owner of a wonderful outdoor (think persian gardens with covering lattices) chicken kabab restaurant, very elegant, we worked there for a month or more every night and he always gave us a free meal. One night a big table of Pakistanis asked us to join them, then the big guy (turns out he was the finance minister of Pakistan) invites us back to the Hilton for drinks after and says "come to Karachi I will get you sitar ans dance teachers".

That is how I ended up with the gig at Radio Pakistan, and also how I received my first lesson from the very thin, mid-30s main sitar player for Radio Pakistan who I met at the studio, we arranged for him to come over to my apartment in PECHS (suburb of Karachi) which was solid marble, wrought iron and shutters on windows (no glazing) with marble floors that radiused up into the walls for easy sweeping. We had no furniture so the place was an echo chamber, he comes in with the big sitar case - understand I had never SEEN a sitar in person and was under the impression that UVK was playing the melody on the record I heard and someone else was accompaning him on some kind of rythym dulcimer sinse I was sure it could not be all done by one player.....

Takes out the sitar and I am immediately struck dumb by the sheer genius - the INSANITY of the thing and then he tore my head off - you could have knocked me over with a feather - with his playing and I was forever smitten and incurably addicted.

BTW, the very first time I actually TOUCHED a sitar was on my 21st birthday and I cut my finer trying to slide up the string......
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fossesitar Senior Member 983 posts
fossesitar
The Finance Minister - his name was Akbar Adil - took us hunting in the Sind desert outside Karachi for BUSTARD - an extremely large bird of prey - his idea of hunting was bouncing across the desert at 60 MPH (almost threw me out of the back seat) while blasting away over the windshied with a 12 gauge.

Naturally his entire motivation was to score with the Afghan woman, never eally sure if he did.....
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trippy monkey 4,281 posts
trippy monkey
fossesitar
What a marvellous adventure!!!!

Anyone beat this or are your 'beginnings' too mundane for THIS post?!?!!?!? :wink: :wink:

Nick
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pfintucson 60 posts
pfintucson
Wow- I guess I'm mundane! But I do remember the late 1960's (amazing I remember anything from back then considering

In my mid-teens I used to take the subway to greenwich Village, Manhattan, and my friends and I would check out the local music scene, which was blossoming like never before- you could hear Miles Davis on one street, Frank Zappa on the next, and a Beatles cover on the next. But something that always grabbed me was this one little shop, on a side street, owned by an elderly Indian man, who always had this incredible music playing on some stereo system, probably sitar or surbahar now that I think back. I didn't know anything about ICM at the time, but I would hang in his shop almost to the point of loitering, just to hear it. Nobody I knew ever played that stuff!

After playing guitar for decades I finally got the bug to get serious, in the 90's (the year, not my age )Being lefty I had to order BEFORE trying so I went through ALi Akbar Music Store and ended up with a pretty sweet HR. Anyway, that's my story.
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OM GUY 841 posts
OM GUY
pfintucson wrote:
Wow- I guess I'm mundane! But I do remember the late 1960's (amazing I remember anything from back then considering

In my mid-teens I used to take the subway to greenwich Village, Manhattan, and my friends and I would check out the local music scene, which was blossoming like never before- you could hear Miles Davis on one street, Frank Zappa on the next, and a Beatles cover on the next. But something that always grabbed me was this one little shop, on a side street, owned by an elderly Indian man, who always had this incredible music playing on some stereo system, probably sitar or surbahar now that I think back. I didn't know anything about ICM at the time, but I would hang in his shop almost to the point of loitering, just to hear it. Nobody I knew ever played that stuff!

After playing guitar for decades I finally got the bug to get serious, in the 90's (the year, not my age )Being lefty I had to order BEFORE trying so I went through ALi Akbar Music Store and ended up with a pretty sweet HR. Anyway, that's my story.
No doubt, we ran into each other, as I was down there all the time, Bleecker, Minetta Lane.... those were the days... Cafe Wha, Purple Onion, incense being sold in apple baskets waffting from the store fronts displaying day-glo posters ...The Bitter End Club...

Bought my first hunk of fire wood at this time. Couldn't find anyone who even knew what a mizrab was, let alone sell you one. Only sitar strings available, as I recall, were sold at Manny's. I'm not even going to mention the brand.... if I remember correctly, the old Bina finally fell apart in the Jersey heat and humidity back near 1975....

ops: I'm getting old.....
Let's hope 2016 is less violent and that people discover the soothing influence of ICM. Hari OM!
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nicneufeld Senior Member 1,566 posts
nicneufeld
Mine is comfortably mundane and utterly clich
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povster Senior Member 2,537 posts
povster
In 1973 I went to a Ravi Shankar concert at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I was not blown away or transported to some ethereal plane, but found it interesting enough to buy an album: SOUND OF THE SITAR. His Malkauns did transport me, so I bought a sitar and found a teacher that week. In retrospect I should have found a teacher and THEN got a sitar.
...Michael
Dasani - the official bottled water of ICM
Panini - the official sandwich of ICM
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AllenDS Senior Member 300 posts
AllenDS
In the mid-1980s I had been a meditation instructor and a student of Vedic philosophy for 10 years when a friend and collegue of mine offered to sell me a sitar he bought on a recent trip to India. He knew that I was playing raga-inspired music on my guitar for years, so when he delivered the sitar he added a custom guitar pick engraved with the words "close, but no sitar".

I was working for a manufacturing company with an Indian engineer who put me in touch with a local sitar player with classical training. Sitar lessons were very important to me because I didn't even kow how to hold the instrument. I'm so glad I got off to a good start!

-Allen
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trippy monkey 4,281 posts
trippy monkey
EXCELLENT STUFF all
Keep 'em rolling...

Nick
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pfintucson 60 posts
pfintucson
Hey, OM GUY! Thanks for reminding me- yeah, I used to buy incense at that shop and, you're right, day-glo posters and black lights everywhere- what memories! I forgot to add that in the mid-nineties I was treated to 3rd row seats to Ravi at the University of Arizona- now that I think about that, THAT was the big push to become one of the addicted. I still didn't know much about what I was hearing but I knew it was special.
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mayer141 202 posts
mayer141
I was forced to play at gun point.....
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OM GUY 841 posts
OM GUY
mayer141 wrote:
I was forced to play at gun point.....
 ....
Let's hope 2016 is less violent and that people discover the soothing influence of ICM. Hari OM!
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trippy monkey 4,281 posts
trippy monkey
GUN POINT?!?!!??

Didn't bloody work though, did it???

Nick
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