Improvisations is a 1962 LP album

LP album

The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...

 by Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar , often referred to by the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the best known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent...

. The opening piece is based on music from Shankar's score for Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...

's 1955 movie Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali is a 1955 Bengali drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray and produced by the Government of the Indian state of West Bengal. Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's 1929 Bengali novel of the same name, the film was the directorial debut of Ray...

with flutist Bud Shank

Bud Shank

Clifford Everett "Bud" Shank, Jr. was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton's Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first...

 playing in Indian style. Shankar composed "Fire Night" influenced by the 1961 Los Angeles fires and the song features jazz musicians Shank (flute) and Gary Peacock

Gary Peacock

Gary Peacock is an American jazz double-bassist.-Biography:After military service in Germany, in the early sixties he worked on the west coast with Barney Kessel, Bud Shank, Paul Bley and Art Pepper, then moved to New York. He worked there with Bley, the Bill Evans trio , and Albert Ayler's trio...

 (bass) improvise over Indian percussion instruments. The concluding ragas are in classical Indian style: the first raga, Kirvani, with South Indian origin, and the second, Rageshri, with North Indian origin. The album was released in CD

Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 format by Angel Records

Angel Records

Angel Records is a record label belonging to EMI. It was formed in 1953 and specialised in classical music, but included an occasional operetta or Broadway score...

 in 1999 and has been described as a "visionary recording" by Allmusic reviewer Heather Phares.

Track listing

1. "Improvisation on the Theme Music from Pather Panchali" – 7:07
2. "Fire Night" – 4:37
3. "Karnataki (Raga Kirvani)" – 6:43
4. "Raga Rageshri: Part 1 (Alap)" – 6:50
5. "Raga Rageshri: Part 2 (Jor)" – 11:01
6. "Raga Rageshri: Part 3 (Gat)" – 3:24