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joined to a common neck brace. The strings are placed so that the bow can touch both sets simultaneously; or. when one fingerboard is played, the other can produce sympathetic resonalions (as happens on the sitar and sarod).

The eflfect is quite remarkable. de-spite the channeled sound characteristics of electronic stringed instruments. Shan-kar devotes each side of the album to a South Indian raga and is accompanied by two gifted percussionists: U.K. Si-varaman on the two-headed mridangam drum and Z. Hussain on tabla.

The Karnatic musie of South India has always had, for this listener. morę passion and excitement than the some-times too coolly ascetic musie of the North. Shankar adds to that passion with buoyant improvisations filled with sweeping runs that would do justice both to an Itzhak Perlman and a Stephane Grappelli.

Yet, despite Shankaris familiarity with Western musie (primarily through his association with John McLaughlin of the group Shakti), his musie still falls strangely on most American ears. Indian classical musie and jazz share a tradition of improvisation, but the semitonal mel-ody-mode known as the raga has no real reference point in the West. Ultimately. it is primarily the percussion that. despite the complex tradition that under-Lies tne Indian tala, seems to share the same driving, syncopated accenting that is familiar to jazz.

Shankar wisely doesn’t try to make any artificial connections. thereby man-aging to illuminate the jazz influence that does exist. Unlike the performers on “Shogun,” he never abandons his own valuable aesthetic tradition.

-DON HECKMAN

Joe Pass-Jimmy Rowles: Checkmate Norman Granz, producer Pablo D 2310865

This is a musical match madę in heaven. Two superb soloists become brilliantly perceptive accompanists and weave some gorgeous solo-support musical ta-pestries in the process. On "Checkmate” the sum is even greater than its parts: Jimmy Rowles and Joe Pass move in similar ways musically, so that what would be fascinating coming from just one of them becomes even morę so when it is colored by the other.

In these duets or “conversations” as Nat Hcntoff aptly calls them in his notes. Pass projects morę substance than he does in his usual ensemble situations. With Rowles he gets further under the surface and does so with relatively simple, economical strokes and a minimum of florid technical splash. Part of this may come from what he says is a de-liberate attempt to get close to "an acous-tic sound on his electric guitar. In any case. his tonę is deep and rich and his at-tack relaxed.

Rowles remains inimitably Rowles in almost any situation, going his own unflappable way. mixing dream dust and roller coasters. finding a sensitive spot and poking at it insistently. and occa-sionally lying back and rocking along on an Erroll Garner lag. The tunes aie good. solid, and relatively familiar (What s Your Story Morning Glory, So Rare, Weil Be Together Again) and ofler opportunities for using the imagination. There is one rarely heard piece in Victor Schertzinger’s 1910 hit. Marcheta: on this occasion. it is spelled Marąuita and attributed to Eliseo Grenet.

-JOHN S. WILSON

BELL LABS

(Continued from page 61)

rangę and stereo capability reached commercial recordings, Wagner-Sto-kowski was almost as far out of fashion as Bach-Stokowski, and the maestro chose only smaller Wagnerian passages for recording-sometimes with orches-tras distinctly inferior to the Philadel-phians of 1932.

It was not the lab's purpose at the time to preserve any particular musical entity, of course. Indeed, the LP’s liner notes document one ellipsis that was filled by the Victor equivalent and an-other that had to remain unfilled. And the stoppings and startings of the lab’s own dises could be quite arbitrary, so that sound quality sometimes alters dras-tically in midphrase. Some of the origi-nals sound as though time has taken a tali; others are astonishingly fresh. Yet sińce the patchwork is (but for the Victor fragment) all from continuous perfor-mances. the effect is like looking at a Ru-bens through a Tiffany window: The colors are severely altered in places and the details blurred. but much of the power comes through.

It is ironie that the great brick intru-sion into my historie woods should, in the end. provide its own window into limes gone by. And how tantalizing the view is! What might this technology not have done had it been available com-mercially and the recording industry not struggling for every penny in mid-De-pression? And what else might be hiding, unheard. behind those blank brick walls? Evidently, the two Stokowski LPs represent the cream of the archives, and having skimmed it. Bell Labs plans to is-sue no morę for the time being. HF

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