Cultural Advocate of the Year
As I descended on a rough road from a mountain pass in the Mayan lands near Ocozocoautl, Chiapas, Mexico, through a heavy echo effect the DJ announced the next song, "Noches y Dias Dificiles" by "Los Be-at-les" on "La Programa Musica del Mundo". It occurred to me, the Fab Four really are everywhere. I'm not convinced that The Beatles, or any other chart-topping pop group, need to be everywhere in the world, especially not in the last remote locations. But, the Angeles Verdes driving on the busy Pan American highway, and the official toll collectors, truck drivers and farming Indians, all listening to quirky, harmonic, hyperactive British twerps (said affectionately) was somehow appealing in that humorous visionary moment.
One of them, George Harrison, questioned the motivation to be a pop star, saying, "...there comes a time in your life when you have to decide what life is all about."
2001 Cultural Advocate of the Year
Each year we identify an important advocate for culture -- one who has made a lasting impact on people who are inspired to care about the status of cultural groups in our world. This year we selected a duo -- George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, who each played an integral part in bringing Eastern music to Western audiences, opening doors that are opened by familiarity. More importantly, the two created awareness of humanitarian issues in distant places.
George Harrison
While Harrison and the other Beatles were busy bringing 3:00-minute pop and made-for-TV hysteria to the world, forms of Eastern art and Eastern spiritual teaching were spreading to tiny pockets in Europe and North America. George Harrison took notice. The Byrds' David Crosby pointed Harrison to sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, who had opened the Kinnara School of Indian Music and Culture in Los Angeles, and Harrison discovered the classical music of India.
In 1966, he took to studying the sitar with Shankar in India and, during the six week stay, he came to revere classical Indian music over Western pop. To explore the world beyond the Beatles, Harrison convinced his band mates to travel to India the following year, where they studied with the Hindu spiritual advisor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Harrison found the sitar a perfect vehicle for transcendental meditation taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He studied scriptures of Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda and the ancient Hindu teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. Back in London, Harrison joined Swami Prabhupaba's International Society for Krishna Consciousness and helped found a temple in London for the growing movement.
Following the breakup of the Beatles, Harrison built a solo career with his Dark Horse record label. He established a film production company, HandMade Films, creating cult classics like Time Bandits and The Life of Brian, and more recently, foreign favorites The Secret Laughter of Women and The Man With Rain in His Shoes.
For me personally, one film made possible by his company, Powwow Highway, opened my eyes to the post-Nineteenth Century Native American people. As I wondered what life was like for Native people, seen mostly through old Westerns and left out of the modern media world, Powwow Highway made it clear to me, more than anything else I had been exposed to, that it was possible to visit the Native people today and simply ask.
Longtime fans of George Harrison have said that his most overlooked musical accomplishment was the rejuvenation of Bob Dylan as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, along with himself, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty.
As a Beatle, he produced songs like "Here Comes the Sun" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", and wrote profoundly, "Think for yourself, 'cause I won't be there with you."
Harrison's musical heritage came from Elmor James and Carl Perkins. Through he built on the Sun Studios sound and migrated toward experimental music many times in his career, it was his quest to find himself spiritually that became his greater legacy to the Western world.
His consciousness about life and meditation led him to gardening. He was concerned about humanitarian issues and contributed his time and resources to his wife Olivia's Romanian Angel Appeal, which she founded in 1990 to aid orphans in Romania.
Upon the death of George Harrison, I searched through my music collection and realized that among more than 5,000 titles, I have not one Beatles recording. But, I have one landmark recording made in the Beatles' Abbey Road Studio in 1969. It features members of the Radha Krsna Temple in London performing devotional music and chants from India. On the first session, Harrison played the harmonium, accompanied by percussion, while members of the London Temple chanted the "Hare Krsna Mantra" (released as a single with "Prayer to the Spiritual Masters").
As a devotee of Krishna, Harrison knew the mantra well and included it on "My Sweet Lord", in which he draws parallels to the chanting of "hallelujah" in forms of Christian worship. The three-album set, All Things Must Pass (1970; re-released 2001), and the song, "My Sweet Lord", reached number one on the charts in the U.S. and Britain.
Ravi Shankar
Shankar was well established as one of the wold's most respected musicians when the Beatles found their fame and fortune. He felt no pressure to "westernize" or join with the hippie movement, even as he made appearances in San Francisco, at Woodstock and the Monterey Pop Festival.
As a Bengali, his people suffering from famine, disease and political unrest in the newly-formed state of Eastern Pakistan presented him with his most difficult challenge. He asked his friend George Harrison to help by enlisting Western pop stars for some sort of relief effort. In 1971, Harrison organized the Concert for Bangla Desh in New York's Madison Square Garden, with appearances by Shankar, Leon Russell, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Billy Preston, among others. A pioneering effort that faced tremendous difficulties and set standards for charitable causes to follow, the Concert for Bangla Desh raised $8 million dollars and elevated the awareness of resource-abundant Westerners concerning humanitarian needs in old worlds and distant places.
Shankar's influence enabled Harrison to bring the sound of the sitar to a wide audience. Its use in songs like "Norwegian Wood", "Within You Without You" and "The Inner Light" expanded the interests of Western music listeners and set new boundaries of creativity for other artists. Harrison's innovativeness made it possible for him to host the successful Concert for Bangla Desh fundraiser. His influential effort would encourage artists to produce Live Aid, Band Aid, Farm Aid, and other artist activism, such as the boycott of Sun City, South Africa that increased awareness of conditions brought on by Apartheid.
Harrison's study under Ravi Shankar, and his tours of the U.S. and Canada with the renowned guru, helped audiences develop appreciation for the long and complex ragas played on sitar. Harrison's 1969 recording with the Radha Krsna Temple in London, "Hare Krsna Mantra", became a hit on the British television broadcast, Top of the Pops. It sold 70,000 copies a day. The worshipers made Top of the Pops again in 1971 with "Govinda", from a full length album of chants on Apple. In the relatively isolated Western world at that time, Shankar and Harrison widened the appeal of exotic music, such as the Chinese pipa, the Mongolian morin khuur and South Asian gamelan ensembles as Americans and Europeans searched for new interests.
Ravi Shankar said, "We haven't had to borrow from other cultures. Our music grows within itself." Shankar's music has shown great ability to captivate world-wide audiences without relying on Western influences. Western audiences have great opportunities to be exposed to phenomenal talent today because of Ravi Shankar. Indian artists have benefited greatly from his success, such as violinist L. Shankar and guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who Shankar introduced to Western audiences on highly-acclaimed recordings like Inside the Kremlin, from 1988. Shankar's self-expressed greatest legacy is his daughter, Anoushka Shankar, who has carried on a cultural and family tradition to become a virtuoso of the sitar in her own rite. She has achieved immense notoriety with outstanding recordings, Anoushka, Anourag (featuring performances by her father) and her latest Live at Carnegie Hall.
Though George Harrison created a world-wide dominant trend in music with the Beatles, he also created a counter exchange of culture and ideas that many benefit from today, and Ravi Shankar made it possible. In a controversial statement following his first visit to India, Harrison told the British media, "There's one chap in the Himalayas at this very moment, and he's been there since before Jesus Christ." Harrison's ashes were scattered over the Ganges River near Varanasi, India on December 3, 2001.-- Mark Lacy
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HOUSTON INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE