Essex/Mushroom
Magic Carpet (UK,2011)*****
I promised Alisha Suffit I would give Magic Carpet some renewed attention, because I never came to review their albums before and they don’t get so much exposure either. Their first album for many years was amongst my top favourite folk albums, so it would be a shame that no words were given to this since my website started around 2001. At the time Magic Carpet provided exactly that kind of dreamy, nearly psychedelic songs and atmosphere I was looking for. Today, maybe already 20 years after I bought the Mushroom records reissue, for rather a lot of money, it seems that I still like the album very much.
Magic Carpet were one of the first English bands who combined Indian music with western standards, making a unique sound and folk song style that was a great example for how such combinations worked well, and of course for the psychedelic bands to whom it gave some ideas for an approach. The high quality is a combination of the professionalism of the classically trained sitar player who plays raga-styled, the open tunings on the guitar, the contributions of an Indian tabla player, the great imaginative songs but also the well fitting voice of Alisha Suffit with a special timbre and quick moves from lower to higher registers, there are a few occasional strange moves in key too, all fitting well with the totality of the group sound. There are few small instrumental ragas. “Peace song” has a repetitive theme on guitar and sitar, which is very hypnotic. On “Black Cat” we hear a very fine guitar improvisation. Most tracks are songs. “Harvest Song” is a very dreamy one, but my favourite remains “Do you hear the words”, a melancholic beauty. “Take away Kesh” is more psychedelic. A successful combination of the power of raga with British folk songwriting is “Father Time” where the raga is able to increase speed. The longer bonus track, a real raga on sitar, in two parts (first sitar solo, then sitar with tabla), I like very much too. It is one of those melancholic and moody ragas that is so successful it was more than capturing a moment, but is something that can be repeated in listening as a successful composition too.
The band got some attention, like in London’s 100 Club and some attention by BBC radio, but lack of interest led the band to quit the project very soon. I saw tabla player Keshav Sathe appear on the LP from Chris Thompson, on one of John Martyn albums as well as on some John Renbourn Group album.
Afterwards I heard that before Magic Carpet there had been a band called Sargam who recorded one instrumental raga with guitar and sitar and tabla album, which was published without their permission in 1972 as Sagram with a photograph of some very different people on it. Magic Carpet was the same band with an extra singer, and some extra ideas through it that made their sound more original and more complete. The first track, “Becky’s Dance” returned in a different form on their Magic Carpet album.
