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A TAV Curator's pick.

"Passages is a collaborative chamber music studio album co-composed by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, released in 1990. The album is a hybrid of Hindustani Classical music and Glass' distinct American minimal contemporary Classical style." – Music On Vinyl

"Philip Glass met Ravi Shankar in Paris in the 1960s, a time when Shankar was already famous in the West for his collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar taught Glass, then still in his twenties, how to accurately notate Indian classical music and Glass learnt how Indian music achieves its sophisticated rhythms and ornamentation, which had a profound affect on his approach to rhythmic structures as a foundation to his own music. …

In Passages, American Minimalism fuses with traditional Hindustani classical music to create a mesmerizing flow of exquisite sounds and intoxicating pulsating rhythms. The first movement is based on a theme Shankar gave to Glass (a raga played on saxophone), the second vice versa, and so on through the six movements of the work. The influence of Shankar and Indian music is clear in Glass’ use of complex rhythms and multiple time signatures, repeated elements, drones and open fifths, but Passages is very different from the hard-core Minimalism one normally associates with Philip Glass – the spooling, repetitive motifs which ebb and flow, and his distinctive, sensuous harmonic shifts are all there, but there is a wealth of lyricism and poetry too in the intertwining lines and voices (including solo soprano and four other singers). The whole work is a rich tapestry of sounds as East and West flow effortlessly in and out of one another, with passages of jewel-like clarity and exotic dialogues between Western and Indian instruments." – Bachtrack

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