“The Tragedy Of Shanti”

By Neil Seidel

"The core of "Shanti" was Ashish Kahn and Pranesh Kahn, Zakir Hussain, Steve Leach myself and Francisco Lupica and we recorded one album for Atlantic Records.

The picture on the back of the album is from Mickey Harts ranch. Shanti did a live radio broadcast with Jerry Garcia and The New Riders of the Purple Sage. Zakir and Mickey wound up doing many projects together after that. As a matter of fact, the recording studio where we cut "Shanti" was Pacific High Recorders in SF which was the signature sound of The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver and what is known as "The San Francisco Sound."

We had a vast market appeal unfortunately Atlantic Records didn't get behind the band and if a company doesn't really get behind any band you sort of die in the water.

We auditioned for George Harrison to get a contract on Apple Records.  He (GH) was a big fan of Indian music because of his connections with Ravi Shankar. The irony of the whole thing was that Ravi Shankar, who was a mentor of George Harrison,' actually forbade George from signing us because he didn't want to mix pop music with Indian music. Of course he did that himself with many projects but he put the kibosh in our record. 

During that time we were playing in San Francisco and we got a visitation at one of our concerts by John McLaughlin who came back stage and said he was crazy about what we did. That's where he met Zakir and that led to "Shakti." Except McLaughlin took it in another direction, more of a fusion of new age jazz and Indian music.

The great thing about Shanti and I think the tradegy of Shanti not being promoted was that we had an undefinable genre. Nobody quite knew where or who to put us with. We played "The Fillmore" with Humble Pie and Swamp Dogg. We played "The Ash Grove" with Commander Cody & HLPA, we played with John Handy and Ali Akbar Kahn @ The Palace of Fine Arts in SF and we played with "Little Feat " at "The Bowl" in Berkeley.