SAGRAM

This album POP EXPLOSION SITAR STYLE is perhaps one of the boldest thefts of musical creativity of the era and despite the tacky album cover insinuating that the music was nothing more than a bunch of Hugh Hefner Playboy seduction tunes, the music featured an authentic jamming session of Indian ragas that the trio played after being invited by the owner of Windmill Records to perform at his studio.

Unbeknownst to the band, the musical session was recorded in 1969 and was released without their consent when it hit the market in 1972. Several years later the band saw this album in a checkout at a local supermarket and released that their music had been stolen and released as a budget discount album! Oh the humiliation! And if that wasn't bad enough the unscrupulous shyster even tarnished the band name by releasing it as SAGRAM instead of the band's REAL name Sargam which refers to a way of assigning syllables to pitches (solminization) in Indian music.

To add insult to injury was the Playboy bunny comforting sugar daddy type album cover however despite this 1969 recording session being hijacked out of the band's control, the album has still become somewhat of a collectible probably due to the its novelty status. Musically speaking there is nothing out of the ordinary on this one. This is an all instrumental affair and features six tracks that add up to over 38 minutes of playing time. What we get here is a bunch of standard raga by the numbers tunes that feature a lead sitar, guitar strumming and tabla percussion.

Belying the hilariously awful album cover, POP EXPLOSION SITAR STYLE is very much an authentic transcendental type of album with rich warm Indian music motifs that add a bit of diversity in tempos and dynamics. The trio were quite skilled at their assigned instruments and the music sounds about as authentically Indian as it gets and although the rock side of the equation of virtually absent, i suppose the underlying compositional flow could qualify as rock since unadulterated Indian ragas tend to focus on improvisation over composition and SAGRAM focused on the latter.

It probably goes without saying that the history of SAGRAM's sole album is more interesting than the music itself. While the music presented offers the timeless beauty of Indian Hindustani classic music with a touch of Western influences, it's not really much of a deviation from simply playing traditional raga music without Western influences. This is basically a trio who has mastered the style in perfect authenticity. While a truly pleasant listening experience, this isn't one of those albums that will blow anybody away for sure. I would call this more of a raga folk album as its all acoustic and only the guitar qualifies as a connection to Western music.