Hindustani Slide Guitar Part 2

The Hindustani music of northern India is one of the world’s great art forms: astonishingly rich and intellectually complex (but at the same time emotionally powerful and direct), these musical traditions are stunning to listen to and enriching to play. Developed over more than a thousand years, this ancient-yet-living music has absorbed folk traditions, religious ritual and the instruments of foreign invaders.

The Hindustani slide guitar is an example of this remarkable musical blend – while the guitar is a Western instrument its origins are in the string traditions of India and Central Asia. Thus when Indian musicians embraced the guitar they didn’t simply copy Westerners, instead they adapted it to the ragas played on sitar and sarod. What they developed is one of the world’s most unique and hauntingly beautiful slide guitar styles.

Here East meets West and musical enlightenment beckons.