India, Dagar Brothers

Featuring: Moinuddin Dagar, Nasir Aminuddin Dagar

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (small writing on top corner on back)

Gatefold sleeve with booklet stapled inside.

The Bärenreiter-Musicaphon series was the UNESCO Collection's original home before Philips took it over, and the Indian volumes were recorded and annotated by Alain Daniélou, a Frenchman who spent twenty years in Benares and wrote about Indian music with the confidence of someone who had actually learned to play it. India III is given over to the Dagar Brothers, Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin, and to dhrupad, the oldest surviving vocal style of the Hindustani tradition.

The form works by refusal: an unmetered alap that can run half an hour, no ornamental fireworks, two voices circling a single note until the raga is exhausted rather than displayed, then the pakhawaj drum entering with the fixed composition. Later generations of Dagars recorded more, and more cleanly, but this early European document catches the elder brothers when the style was still a family secret. Sleeve with the Daniélou notes, German pressing.