Smithsonian Folkways

After more than 30 years of globetrotting and recording, somewhere along the way, Mickey Hart became a quasi-Alan Lomax of world music. And by “world music,” we don’t necessarily mean pure academic studies in ethnomusicology, although the six compilations that Hart assembled in the late ‘90s as part of the E*ndangered Music Project* – included here – are most certainly that. Rather, when assessing the 25 albums that make up this venerable Smithsonian retrospective (available digitally or by CD-on-demand), what’s really at issue is the journey, and in particular, Hart’s own personal transformation from Grateful Dead drummer into producer, traveler, shaman and song archeologist. It began, fittingly, in post-psychedelic San Francisco, when Hart first met tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. One of their earliest projects was 1974’s Sarangi: The Music of India – a hastily thrown-together document of a private performance by Ustad Sultan Khan (on the multi-stringed sarangi) and Shri Rij Ram (on tabla drums) that still holds up today as a meditative masterpiece. From there, Hart recorded everything he could, whether he was on the road or holed up in various studios in northern California. Some standouts: The Music of Upper and Lower Egypt, captured during the Dead’s 1978 dates in the land of the pharaohs; The Apocalypse Now Sessions, with Bill Kreutzmann and more; The Invocation and The Beat, Baba Olatunji’s career-resurrecting Drums of Passion reboots; the three-disc epic The Bali Sessions, tracked in wilting humidity in the Balanese capital of Denpasar. If you really want to know Mickey Hart, then this is the place to visit.