Yatra Sextett - 1982 - Sangam

Yatra Sextett

1982

Sangam

01. Dawn 6:28

02. Seven Hills 7:10

03. Rama 5:00

04. Shanti 3:55

05. City Life 10:26

06. Payan 10:06

Bass – Karl Peters

Drum [Thavil], Percussion [Indian Perc] – Ramesh Shottam

Drums, Kanjira – Ranjit Barot

Ghatam, Mridangam – Rajagopalan

Keyboards – Louis Banks

Saxophone – Braz Gonsalves

Vocals [Classical Indian Vocal] – Rama Mani

Recorded January 1981.

Mixed December 1981.

Re-released in UK and India as Louis Banks' Sangam - City Life, in 1982 (CBS – IND 1006)

Pioneering Indian jazz-fusion super-group who first came to Europe as Jazz Yatra Sextett. When the band returned to India they adopted the new name Louis Banks' Sangam recording a new different version of the same material as Citylife. After this Smt. R. A. Ramamani and Ramesh Shotham returned to Europe, and became well-known as leading talents in world jazz.

Louis Banks (real name Dambar Bahadur Budaprithi), is an Indian jazz pianist who's worked with some of the big names in the jazz/fusion scene, including John McLaughlin. In the early 80s he got together with percussionist Ramesh Shotham and a group of musicians from the Karnataka College of Percussion to form the band Sangam, with the clear goal of mixing jazz-rock fusion with the virtuosic traditional music of India. They went on tour in Europe, and ended up collaborating with Embryo, who Shotham (the composer of all of Sangam's material) would play with off and on throughout the 80s. The group apparently didn't stay together for too long, but their album, recorded in Munich and co-produced by Christian Burchard, is a great piece of classic jazz-rock/ethnic fusion that has remained surprisingly obscure, despite its notable lineage. The first side is dominated by a massive, nearly side-long track, reaching a frenzied level of intensity that will leave your head spinning. Things calm down and get a bit moodier after that, but the standard remains very high throughout. Now, the strange thing here is that there are actually two different versions of this album. The first was released on the small German label Eigelstein under the title "Jazz Yatra Sextet", followed less than a year later by the CBS version reviewed here. Having heard both of them, I can say that the track orders are completely different, as are some of the track lengths, although the recordings themselves seem mostly identical. I'm only speculating here, but I think what might have happened is that once they received a little bit of exposure in Europe and got signed to a major label, they decided to re-arrange the material a bit to better suit their liking. However, the CBS version actually seems to be the rarer of the two, oddly enough."