Louis Banks' Sangam ‎– City Life (1983, LP, India)

Tracks:
A1 - City Life (17:48)
A2 - Rama (2:51)
B1 - Dawn (9:14)
B2 - Prayanam (7:27)
B3 - Shanti (4:17)

Musicians:
Louis Banks - keyboards, arranger
Rama Mani - vocals, tanpura
Braz Gonsalves - tenor/soprano saxophones
Ranjit Barot - drums, khanjira
Karl Peters - bass
Ramesh Shottam - thavil, ghatam, percussion
Rajagopalan - miridangam, ghatam

Louis Banks (real name Dambar Bahadur Budaprithi), is an Indian jazz pianist who's worked with some of the big names in the jazz/fusion scene, including John McLaughlin. In the early 80s he got together with percussionist Ramesh Shotham and a group of musicians from the Karnataka College of Percussion to form the band Sangam, with the clear goal of mixing jazz-rock fusion with the virtuosic traditional music of India. They went on tour in Europe, and ended up collaborating with Embryo, who Shotham (the composer of all of Sangam's material) would play with off and on throughout the 80s. The group apparently didn't stay together for too long, but their album, recorded in Munich and co-produced by Christian Burchard, is a great piece of classic jazz-rock/ethnic fusion that has remained surprisingly obscure, despite its notable lineage. The first side is dominated by a massive, nearly side-long track, reaching a frenzied level of intensity that will leave your head spinning. Things calm down and get a bit moodier after that, but the standard remains very high throughout. Now, the strange thing here is that there are actually two different versions of this album. The first was released on the small German label Eigelstein under the title "Jazz Yatra Sextet", followed less than a year later by the CBS version reviewed here. Having heard both of them, I can say that the track orders are completely different, as are some of the track lengths, although the recordings themselves seem mostly identical. I'm only speculating here, but I think what might have happened is that once they received a little bit of exposure in Europe and got signed to a major label, they decided to re-arrange the material a bit to better suit their liking. However, the CBS version actually seems to be the rarer of the two, oddly enough. (CdReissueWishList)