Raga Rock (album)

Raga Rock
Studio album by the Folkswingers featuring Harihar Rao
Released	June 10, 1966
Studio	World Pacific, Los Angeles
Genre	Raga rock
Length	29:54
Label	World Pacific
Producer	Richard Bock

Raga Rock is an album credited to "the Folkswingers featuring Harihar Rao", who was a Los Angeles-based Indian classical musician and ethnomusicologist. The album was released in June 1966 on the World Pacific record label. The title refers to the raga rock trend in popular music, as artists such as the Beatles, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds had all begun incorporating Indian influences into their recent work. Led by the sitar playing of Rao, a longtime associate of Ravi Shankar, the album contains instrumental versions of several of these contemporary songs, including "Norwegian Wood", "Eight Miles High" and "Paint It Black". Other members of the Folkswingers for this release included jazz musicians such as Herb Ellis and Dennis Budimir, and members of the Los Angeles pool of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.

While it was intended to capitalize on the raga rock trend, the album also furthered the scope of the subgenre.^[1] It was followed by a series of similar albums in which contemporary pop songs were arranged for sitar, including releases by Lord Sitar and Ananda Shankar. Raga Rock was reissued on CD in 2007 by Fallout Records.