Ravi Shankar is a major iconic figure of 20th century music, a wonderfully talented sitar player and improviser who remains the best-known musician that India has ever produced. He gave the “raga” of his country a worldwide reputation, and he was a precursor of not only the hippie movement but also the many experiments that took place in rock (George Harrison, Jimmy Page,…) and jazz, and even classical music in the seventies. This anthology prepared by Jean-Baptiste Mersiol and Jacques Viret deals with the first recordings made by the man who would achieve lasting fame as the apostle of world music and the creator of dialogue between our different cultures.