Third Ear Band

Third Ear Band – Ghetto Raga

(Harvest, 1969)

In the London underground milieu, India had been firmly rooted since the mid-60s. The trips of the Ufo Club, the underground Pink Floyd of the Syd Barrett era, the more Harrison–oriented Beatles, are merely the most prominent beacons of the Eastern-leaning front of psychedelia as it was taking shape. Among them was also jazz drummer Glen Sweeney, who on this occasion transformed himself, in proper Indian style, into a tabla percussionist. His first attempts to gather musicians around him, which coalesced into the expanded National-Balkan Ensemble (backed by that same Ron Geesin who would soon work wonders on "Atom Heart Mother"), seemed destined merely to deliver a more erudite version of already familiar and well-worn harmonic experiments. Consciousness-expanding distortions conveyed through virtually endless jams.

A fortuitous event is what pushes these initial intentions to evolve. Sweeney and his companions find themselves robbed of all the electric and electronic instrumentation assembled up to that point; all that remains are acoustic instruments, specifically an oboe, a viola and a cello, plus the founder's percussion.

This is where the great idea is born of making a virtue of necessity, an idea that would push the East-West cross-pollination principle well beyond what had already been attempted, towards the discovery of the arcane, metaphysical origin of all musical languages. The exclusively acoustic sound allows the Third Ear Band, the newly formed quartet (alongside Sweeney, Paul Minns on oboe, Mel Davis on cello, Dave Tomlin on violin, Richard Coff on viola), to focus on their stylistic range, to expand their points of reference beyond measure, to the point of losing all contact and crossing the threshold of the absolute, reaching indeed the "third ear". To conjure everything out of nothing, in other words.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Renaissance folk, medieval saltarello, African percussion: the interweavings of the Third Ear Band give the wonderful illusion of being limitless. There is, however, a constant, or a recurring element, in their early compositions, namely the diatonic scale of the Indian and Persian raga. This parameter, used as a free paradigm rather than a fixed scheme, helps the four musicians compose one of their most monumental and iconic tracks, an icon that best exemplifies their sound, "Ghetto Raga". The standout track of their first proper album, "Alchemy" (Harvest, 1969), and the first of their two masterpieces alongside its successor – and even more radical – "Elements" (Harvest, 1970), "Ghetto Raga" runs past the 10-minute mark. In fact, it's a piece that seems to last forever, almost like a kind of boundless prayer – albeit wordless – that simultaneously builds on and transcends that very cumulative effect of the classic jams of historic psychedelia from which it originally sprang.

"Ghetto Raga" is a celebration of the spiritual meaning of the raga, that is, the musical system based on monotonic "modes", as opposed to Western harmony, which is instead based on multi-note chords. Above all, it's a celebration that moves through remote cultures, eras and styles: the frenzy of contemporary Terry Riley, Western polyphonies, the ecstasy of the mantra, South Asian gamelan, the bolero, Miles Davis-style modal jazz, Vivaldi and Albinoni in the oboe's refracting folds, a slender yet insistent, dancing rhythm that mimics folk music from around the world. These, and other elements besides, can be glimpsed in "Ghetto Raga", even if, in the end, the tally gets lost in the track's ecstatic, flowing drift.

It opens like an awakening, a dawn, a call to prayer. What follows is a free-flowing fantasia of oboe notes and strings stretched over a single sustained chord. Insistent percussion swells the trills and harmonic waves, charging them with even greater spiritual momentum, until it sketches out a majestic, crescendoing fugue.

Minimalist figures interweave without pause, until, around the sixth minute, they reach a supernatural peak of dissonant harmonics, a mantra-like hypnosis that then fades into mezzo-piano, with a piercing sense of mystery, in a sonata fit for snake charmers and ecstatic resonances.

“Ghetto Raga” is a set of vibrating sonic expanses, meant, as noted, not only to throw open the doors of perception onto the musics of the world (it is, in every sense, the birth of world music), but also to uncover an original strain capable of rebuilding rock music in an ecstatic key, as universal liturgy, as total fusion of knowledge and humanism, naturalism and the supernatural. A fusion that remains unsurpassed to this day, despite the most experimental fringes of certain jazz-rock, new age, and the drone music of the same era. A lesson for the future, perhaps still not fully absorbed.

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20/02/2026