L Subramaniam arrived in California in 1973, a heady moment for what was being called “East-West fusion”. Ravi Shankar had paved the way, first with a series of albums with Richard Bock’s World Pacific label — which would later champion Subramaniam too — and then with his performances at the Monterey Pop Festival and at Woodstock. A whole generation of American and European musicians was now looking East for inspiration.
Subramaniam, who played on Shankar’s iconic 1974 album Shankar Family & Friends (produced by George Harrison), would spend the first decade of his career building on that legacy with a string of improvisational Indo-jazz records, incorporating Carnatic ragas and African-American rhythm to create a style he liked to call “neo-fusion”. Meanwhile, he was also dreaming up a far grander, more ambitious vision of musical synthesis. “I loved Indian classical music and Western classical music, but I also loved other traditions,” he says.
“African music, Chinese music...
all the different traditions from different peoples around the world...
I wanted to bring them all together, under the term global music or ‘global fusion’.” The Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival, founded in 1992, proved to be a big step, as he and his then-wife Vijayashree (she died in 1995) brought together some of the best musicians from countries as diverse as Norway, Japan, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan. Seven years later, Subramaniam would take the lessons he learnt fro.