The new live album That Which Colors the Mind, recorded in 1970 by Grateful Dead sound man Owsley Stanley, captures a riveting performance by Ali Akbar Khan, Zakir Hussain and Indranil Bhattacharya.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

May 1970, in a room best known for reverberating with the sounds of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, three masters of Indian classical music took the stage for a celebration of Indian ragas. The concert was recorded by another legend at the time, Owsley Stanley, the man who designed the Dead's innovative sound system as well as making what was, well, reputed to be the best LSD of the day. That recording has finally been released. It's called "That Which Colors The Mind." Bilal Qureshi has the story.

BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: On that Friday night 50 years ago, Indian sarod master Ali Akbar Khan was joined on stage by a 19-year-old percussionist named Zakir Hussain.

ZAKIR HUSSAIN: I was very young, that's true. And I had just arrived in America a few months before, just trying to still find my way around the country and trying to understand the slang. The words like far-out and groovy and all weren't quite registering.

QURESHI: The language of the hippie generation may not have registered for Zakir Hussain, but sitar maestro Ravi Shankar had already electrified the Woodstock and Monterey Pop festivals. And the audience in San Francisco that night was primed to listen.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

HUSSAIN: In India, I was used to playing with the audience, chiming in, everybody saying wow and kya baat and do that again and all that stuff. But here, the audience was quiet, eyes closed, meditative. The room was dark, so you couldn't really make eye contact with the audience. And so you were left to rely on your interaction with your fellow musicians and to see how that conversation unfolds.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

QURESHI: Since his first American concerts, Zakir Hussain has become the world's most famous tabla player. He now lives in California, and he says it was this performance 50 years ago that showed him that Indian classical music could be played in the West in its purest form.

HUSSAIN: It really set the tone of how I would present myself to my fellow musician, whoever I was accompanying, for the rest of my life.

QURESHI: Capturing the performance in the highest fidelity possible was the goal of Owsley Stanley, the man known as The Bear, and more famously as the Grateful Dead's soundman.

HUSSAIN: He was a man who ran around like a madman on stage and trip over wires and fall and curse. And it was obvious that this was a guy who was possessed. This was a guy who knew what needed to be done about how this music should be presented to those who were not there. I mean, Bear had this idea that the music should be heard in a way where people can close their eyes and actually see where the musicians are seated.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

STARFINDER STANLEY: His objective with his recordings was to try to capture the audience's experience so that he could improve the sound system.

QURESHI: That's Starfinder Stanley, the late Owsley son and head of the Owsley Stanley Foundation.

STANLEY: He was an audiophile who was born in a low-fidelity world. And the sound systems for rock ’n’ roll when he got involved were pretty rudimentary. And he wanted it to be better. And he called his tapes his sonic journals. They were his working diary so that he could improve the sound.

QURESHI: The foundation has begun restoring Stanley's tapes and releasing the music. Hawk Semins is the executive producer of the series.

HAWK SEMINS: He had collected about 1,300 reels of 80 different artists and nearly every idiom that you can imagine of music.

QURESHI: From Miles Davis to Janis Joplin, Semins says these live recordings capture the magic of the '60s and '70s Bay Area music scene.

SEMINS: It's just absolutely remarkable, the mix that's reflected the contacts that there were, the openness of the scene, the open-mindedness of the scene in terms of the various musical influences. So you've got Ali Akbar Khan one night, and you've got Commander Cody another night, and you've got the Grateful Dead another night. And they were all listening to each other. And they were all playing with each other.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

QURESHI: It was a time for expanding consciousness. And while Starfinder Stanley acknowledges his father's role in chemically altering the minds of that scene's participants, he insists the music was Owsley Stanley's real drug. And Zakir Hussain says that idea is captured in the new album's title.

HUSSAIN: Thousands of years back, there was a man, a genius named Bharata in India, and he wrote many treaties. And one of them is called Bharata’s "Natya Shastra." And one thing it says about raga - it says rangati iti raga, which means that which colors the mind is a raga. And that ties into this recording, the title.

QURESHI: Starfighter Stanley says he hopes the recordings can introduce a new generation to a pivotal moment in American music history, as genres and cultures cross-pollinated in a spirit of openness and dialogue.

STANLEY: I think especially with all the chaos that's going on in the world right now, people need music. They need to take a breath, take a step back, stop doomscrolling through all the crazy stuff that's going on and let this into your mind and let it soothe that internal monologue. And this album in particular is great for that. It just transports you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

QURESHI: For NPR News, I'm Bilal Qureshi.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Genre: World  Zakir Hussain  Zakir Hussain  Zakir Hussain