GEORGE HARRISON: The Chromatic One

There are musicians whose impact is immediate-albeit showman’s swagger or a Marshall-melting guitar solo. Songs operate similarly. Some like “She Loves You” reach out and grab your attention after the first bar; others reveal their qualities little by little.There are musicians whose impact is immediate-albeit showman’s swagger or a Marshall-melting guitar solo. Songs operate similarly. Some like “She Loves You” reach out and grab your attention after the first bar; others reveal their qualities little by little.

A good number of George Harrison’s songs fall into the latter category. Perhaps because of the media circus that surrounded The Beatles, and the attendant mythology that has surrounded his life, the real quality of Harrison’s songs has been overlooked. Any listener who gives his work both time and attention will find that Harrison was the most harmonically adventurous of any of The Beatles.

Harrison’s formative musical influences were steeped in melody-Hoagy Carmichael and Cab Calloway rubbing shoulders with Hank Williams’ country blues. Later, his two primary songwriting models were John Lennon/Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan. Once The Beatles had completed their rise to the top, Harrison received occasional coaching from Lennon as a pop writer (“I Need You”), and by 1965 and Rubber Soul, he was writing strong melodies of his own, as evidenced in “If I Needed Someone.” These were a guitar player’s songs, driven by chord patterns and arpeggios.

1965 was also the year of Harrison’s musical epiphany when he discovered the classical music of India. This was the catalyst and foundation for one of the more distinctive song writing styles in popular music. Although Harrison had never studied Western music in a formal sense, he devoted himself to learning not just the sitar but also the theory of Indian music-in an intense way. His knowledge of the music’s structures, techniques and mores was far from superficial.

He came to deeply understand the microtonal scales of the ragas, the ornamental “effects” of Indian soloists, the meend (equivalent to Western glissando) and the gamak (varieties of infinitely subtle and defined string bends or “wobbles”). These effects would receive their fullest expression in Harrison’s music through his nonpareil slide guitar stylings that emerged in 1970.

He seemed to relate to and assimilate this “alien” music instinctively and by 1966-1967 was expertly marrying pop sensibilities to Indian forms, particularly in “Love You To” and “Within You Without You.” The melody of the latter was sketched out on a harmonium as Harrison sought to frame his melody within a drone.

Another song from 1967, “Blue Jay Way,” was conceived on the harmonium but is more significant in that it reveals the depth of Harrison’s understanding of Indian music, as well as his ability to express it in a pop context.  The opening sequence of notes imposes part of the scale from an Indian raga called “Marwa” onto a basic C-major chord. He uses notes that are dissonant in the C-major setting (E-flat and F-sharp), pivoting them around a C-diminished chord. Harrison was working at a sophisticated level of extrapolating Indian scales to the Western setting, something no one else had done. It certainly was not rock ‘n’ roll, and the quality of his work was now to be found in the details-not in the immediate impact. Perhaps this is why this example of Harrison radically pushing the songwriting envelope is rarely discussed in such terms.

Years later, at the end of his career and life, Harrison returned to “Raga Marwa” and recorded an extraordinarily expressive slide guitar interpretation of it. Found on the posthumous Brainwashed album, “Marwa Blues” is Harrison’s finest moment as an instrumentalist and compositional interpreter of Indian music. Notably, by this point Harrison’s slide technique was so advanced that his sound was similar to that of an Indian vichitra veena player. This Grammy-winning guitar reading of the raga, set in Western harmony with a blues subtext, completes four cycles around a gently undulating harmonic framework that pivots on a major-to-minor variation. In tandem with his devotion to harmonically unstable diminished chords (and complex chord voicings like minor sevenths with a flattened fifth, also found on this recording), it is perhaps his use of the major to minor change that most encapsulates his cognition of Indian raga structures.

The broad harmonic palette is also found on many of his most renowned works. This virtual 12-tone sensibility was often married with the visual aspects of unearthing chord patterns on a guitar. A case in point is “Isn’t It A Pity” from All Things Must Pass, considered by many as one of Harrison’s premier works. The song is set in straightforward G-major, but the sixth bar weaves a certain mystery with a chord technically definable as C#minor 7-5 with a G in the bass. The next chord is C major seventh with a G bass. Any guitar player will be able to see that the “mystery” chord was created simply by moving one note of the C-major seventh chord up one fret (the C fingered at the second fret on the A string, raised to the third fret, giving a C#).

This happens when a guitar player goes through an unconscious thought process along these lines: “I wonder what it will sound like if I move that C up a fret.” And for someone whose ears had been opened to dissonance as a managed feature of Indian music, Harrison viewed the results as perfectly acceptable.