Thanks for sharing Pebber. It is a great song yes. I saw Luc Ponty live once with Stanley Clark and 1 other guy (I think it was one of the Marsalis' brothers) a real great show.

These timing sequences looks to me something with triplets?

It gives a "weird" feeling to me. I like it the whole song I'm listening now for the fourth on a row.

I like the acomponying chords that McLaughlin plays as well very beautifull to me.

Amazing!

Zakir's badass, through and through.

I have a friend who has played tabla for several years now (who coincidentally has hung out with Zakir a few times in NYC), and he's been walking me through the very basics of Konnakol. I've found it REALLY helpful for playing in the less-Western times (specifically 7 and 10 have been the hardest for me). I claim absolutely no real knowledge or practice of Indian classical which is it's own beautiful beast, but I for any guitarists struggling to get their head around weirder times, I highly recommend it.

@Herm, thats good stuff man, I always had an interest in tabla, such a far out sound, then again, I suppose being exposed to nothing but diatonic music for most of my life, the eastern music sounds so exotic and far out. As far the as the video goes, jazz violin? Sold. Incredible.

Yeah man...tabla sneaks its way into a lot of stuff. Like, you'll be watching a movie with a jangly soundtrack and all the sudden be like, wtf, is that tabla in this?! It's pretty versatile.

But yeah, Indian is its whole own thing man. My two cents is that they are as comfortable with rhythm as we are with melody and harmony. So in other words, it's fairly normal for Western music to have pretty complex harmonies and melodic movements, but to us it's intuitive...it just feels right. But we rarely venture outside of of 2/4, 3/4 or 4/4. Indian music, on the other hand, tends to be pretty linear melodically, and has almost no harmony (save for the droning), but rhythmically gets very complicated very quickly, to the point that without serious training, you can't really count it. But to Indians, those rhythms are much more intuitive and natural.

That said, I admit to knowing very little! I'm just an outsider looking in and appreciate it. If you're interested at all, I would recommend Derek Trucks...he's a great gateway to go from Blues to Indian, haha. I don't know why but this forum doesn't like me posting the youtube link, but check out his song "Sahib Teri Bandi" live on YouTube.

Also, Ali Akbar Khan is where a lot of people start.