I was fortunate to attend a concert of Remember Shakti (Zakir Hussain, Selva Ganesh, U. Srinivas, Shankar Mahadevan and John McLaughlin) a couple of years ago. It was a tribute to the original group from the 70′s called Shakti comprising of Zakir Hussain, L. Shankar, John McLaughlin and Vikku Vinayakam.

While Remember Shakti was made of stalwarts, the music hardly added up to anything great leading to one of my very few walkouts from a concert. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a couple of videos of the original Shakti and I have been hooked on to the videos ever since. A couple of the them are below.

Shakti was a  purely accoustic group then and the fast paced pieces made them stand a class apart. The youth of the performers was obvious, so was the naivety and thereby eagerness and spirit in their performances. They weren’t masters of their art then, but the music sounded better. Especially watch out for Zakir Hussain, he even misses once as he tries to extrapolate the guitarist, but that childlike enthusiasm just makes you want to listen to them.

Video 1 :

Video 2 :

On that note, I discovered that Rajshri hosts quite a few concerts here, with a few vintage videos from Sawai Gandharva music festival of Pune too. Do check it out, especially the one by violinists Ganesh and Kumaresh at the India gate.

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