Indian and Middle Eastern Music

[smittypants]

Does anyone know a good place to find some good Indian or Middle Eastern mandolin music? Either recordings, midi, or notation.

Thanks,
Chris

[jmcgann]

For Indian music on the mandolin, SRINIVAS who has some solo recordings and works with John McLaughlin in the recent versions of Shakti. Prepare to be stunned. He was a monster at a very early age and just gets deeper and more amazing with time.

[crosspicker]

I just got a book entitled "An Introduction to South Indian Music" by Charlie Mariano which has a bunch of tunes in the Carnatic style which is the style of Indian music that U. Srinivas plays. The tunes are in western notation and not specific to any instrument. I bought the book from Elderly for $14.20 I believe.
I bought some CDs by Snehasish Mozumder after seeing his name mentioned on this board-
"Mandolin Dreams" and "Different Strokes"- on which he plays North Indian music on an accoustic mandolin accompanied by a tabla. He also has a CD called "Worship-An Unique Indian Classical Soiree" which is an ensemble effort with a bunch of different Indian instruments on it. I like this CD a lot. The mandolin is only featured on a couple of tracks on this CD. Mozumder also plays 12 string accoustic guitar and even a little bit of banjo on one track. I got these CDs at Amazon.com.

[berkeleymando]

Any of you working on Hindustani ragas on the mandolin. I find that if I drop the E string to a D and do fast crosspicking it functions as a nice drone or "chikari" string and gives a nice sitar like sound. Of course this is on an electric solidbody mando with single strings so I can bend notes nicely. We had an earlier thread going a few months ago about U Srinivas and mandolin in the Indian classical music traditions.