Ahh, the sitar. You are the most popular and easily recognised of Mother India’s many hundreds of musical children. With you have great souls reached for the heavens all the easier to touch the majestic.Also (alas), have other souls twiddled and contrived, taken advantage of and abused your innate beauty to make sounds of a more base alchemy.No matter how you like your music served (serious or frivolous)the sitar never fails to inspire the human heart.

Bill "Ravi" Harris has a day job. He produces very groovy R&B records for the likes of Sharon Jones and the Daptones on his Daptone Records label. As a teenager Gabriel Roth (Bill’s day-job name) had two loves: James Brown and the sitar. The combination was bound to end in trouble one day. And that day resulted in a weirdly wonderful recording called, not unexpectedly, Funky Sitar Man. As some have noted, Harris is no Ravi Shankar. But then again, Shankar never tried his hand at James Brown. Harris gets encouragement for his sitar-funk curry from a couple of Prophets: Mike Wagner on bass and on drums, Philippe Lehman.

Back in the early 1970s when Steely Dan actually was more than two camera-shy musical nerds (but let’s admit, nigh on geniuses too) and actually looked like a band, they had this mega hit that trilled from car radios all across the USA. The highlight is neither he frazzled hair-dos nor the out of sync visuals but the wonderful electric sitar solo by Denny Dias. An inevitable invention of the Age of Aquarius, the electric sitar is actually a guitar configured to sound like Saraswati’s instrument. First produced by a New Jersey company called Danelectro that specialised in guitars, amps and musical accessories for the mass market, the instrument caught on with the spaced-out set of the late 1960s. The chief innovation of the electric sitar is a set of sympathetic strings, typically located on the side of the instrument each with its own pickup.

The psychedelic era was the sitar’s Golden Age; an era when people were too stoned to demand much more from their music than a swirly confection of eclectic beats, weird time scales and outlandish instruments. But amidst all that ornateness a few sounds achieved landmark status as ‘tones of a generation’: the Hammond B3 organ and our friend the sitar. Abbas Mehrpouya one of Iran’s funkier pop stars from the pre-Revolutionary days (he passed away in 1992) is credited with introducing the sitar to Reza Shah’s Persian Kingdom, which is home to an ancestor of the Indian instrument called the setar. Get a load of this very cool track with both organ and sitar, which captures the Eastern mystical mythology of psychedelia with exceptional brilliance.

Todd Mosby

Raga

Todd Mosby, an American musician who hails from a family of inventors, is the world’s only master of what is variously called the Imrat sitar or Imratguitar. A 20-stringed instrument with (arguably) two necks it was designed by Ustad Imrat Khan who has said, “The imratguitar combines the finest aspects of sitar and guitar. It sounds better than a sitar and better than a guitar.”Producing beautiful sounds that glide between purab and paschim, Mosby here plays a raga at a benefit concert for victims of the Japanese tsunami in 2011. This is a musician and instrument to keep an eye in the future.

The Turks have long had a deep respect for and sympatico relationship with Indian music. Orhan Gencebay is a Turkish renaissance artist (actor, musician, director, singer, composer, and in all likelihood all-round-good-guy) who steers this week’s musical journey to a close with a lovely composition in which the sitar (played by Mr Gencebay) is placed at the center of a windstorm of strings, gently strummed acoustic guitar and evocative vocals (again, hats off to Orhan). This piece alone should get you exploring Turkish music further. As well as the myriad ways in which the sitar has been put to use.