Which musician, together with George Harrison, organised 'The Concert For Bangladesh' at Madison Square Garden in 1971?
"into the Commonwealth on April 18, 1972. Britain holds the largest Bangladeshi diaspora in the western world, now numbered at around 500,000, most of them can trace their ties to the region of Sylhet. Britain also holds the largest open air Asian festival in Europe called Baishakhi Mela, a Bangladeshi event held in London. In 1971, hearing Ravi Shankar's distress, former Beatles lead guitarist George Harrison helped organize the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden. At that time, the country was ravaged by floods, famine and the Liberation War against Pakistan, which left 10 million people — mostly women"
"Lord"" and ""What Is Life"". In the spring of 1971, Harrison learned from his friend and mentor, Ravi Shankar, about the desperate people of Bangladesh, who had been devastated both by military violence and a vicious cyclone. Harrison immediately set about organizing an event which would take place in Madison Square Garden within just five weeks—the Concert for Bangladesh—from which a live album could raise further funds for the Bangladeshi refugees. Klein hustled to get the invited artists, including Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, to play for free while donating their shares of royalties to charity, and convinced Capitol Records"
"by a newly created documentary feature, ""The Concert for Bangladesh Revisited with George Harrison and Friends"", which included recollections from many of the project's participants and contextual input from then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, US Fund for UNICEF president Charles Lyons and Live Aid founder Bob Geldof. As with the live album, sales of the DVD release of the film continue to benefit the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF. Saul Swimmer's ""Concert for Bangladesh"" documentary combined footage from both of the Madison Square Garden shows held on 1 August 1971, using George Harrison's preference of the performances of the songs."
"ex-Beatle George Harrison was inspired to organize The Concert for Bangladesh, in part from the 1970 Bhola Cyclone, and from the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide and Bangladesh Liberation War. Although it was the first benefit concert of its type, it was extremely successful in raising money, aid and awareness for the region's plight. In December, the League of Red Cross Societies drafted a plan for immediate use should a comparable event to the cyclone hit other ""disaster prone countries"". A Red Cross official stated some of the relief workers sent to East Pakistan were poorly trained, and the organisation would compile"
"writes of the track: ""'Awaiting on You All' has a timeless exuberance that even Beatles-haters should experience."" ""Awaiting on You All"" was one of the songs Harrison played at the Concert for Bangladesh, held at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 1 August 1971. Featuring backing from a band including Clapton, Voormann, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Jim Keltner and Jim Horn, Harrison performed the song at both the afternoon and the evening shows. The latter performance was included on the ""Concert for Bangladesh"" live album, which Spector again co-produced, and in the film of the concert. Joshua Greene"
"Concert for Bangladesh at New York's Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971. The two-show charity event was organized by Harrison and featured Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Ravi Shankar and Badfinger. In 1975, with his EMI Records contract due to expire, Lennon asked Bennett to reach out to CBS head Walter Yetnikoff to see if the label was interested in the former Beatle coming on board. Before serious negotiations began, Lennon chose to take a career break. Michael Jackson heard of these discussions and asked Bennett if he could open a door to CBS for himself and"
"and their associated releases as ""the George Harrison Moment"", while Gary Tillery has written: ""The Concert for Bangladesh sealed Harrison's stature as something more than just a major celebrity ... He changed the perception of recording artists, making it clear they could be good world citizens too – willing to set aside their egos and paychecks in order to help people who were suffering."" Politically, as Bangladeshi historian Farida Majid would note, the ""warmth, care and goodwill"" of the August 1971 concerts ""echoed all over the world"", inspiring volunteers to approach UNICEF and offer their assistance, as well as eliciting"
"a deluxe-edition CD/DVD set that included film clips of four songs. George Harrison's 1971–72 humanitarian aid project for the new nation of Bangladesh had left him an international hero, but also exhausted and frustrated in his efforts to ensure that the money raised would find its way to those in need. Rather than record a follow-up to his acclaimed 1970 triple album, ""All Things Must Pass"", Harrison put his solo career on hold for over a year following the two Concert for Bangladesh shows, held at Madison Square Garden, New York, in August 1971. In an interview with ""Disc and"
"1971, Harrison performed ""Wah-Wah"" as the opening song for the rock-music portion of the two Concert for Bangladesh shows, held at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was therefore the first song he ever played live as a solo artist and, given the humanitarian cause behind the event, Alan Clayson writes, the New York audience ""loved him ... before he'd even plucked a string"". The running order of the ""Concert for Bangladesh"" live album follows the setlist for the second show that day, about which Joshua Greene remarks on the ""logical chronology"" in Harrison's three-song opening segment: ""Wah-Wah"" ""declared"
"the many words of acclaim that have been written about ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" since its release, author Tom Moon describes it as an album to play ""whenever your faith in the power of music begins to wane"". Sales of ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" continue to benefit the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF, which raised $1.2 million for children in the Horn of Africa, in a 2011 campaign marking the album's 40th anniversary. While in Los Angeles in June 1971, and after being made aware of the gravity of the situation in what was then known as East Pakistan by"
"the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971. Three years later, with the new nation of Bangladesh still beset by problems, and conflict clouding the issue of friendship generally for Harrison, Inglis suggests that ""this is one friendship [Harrison] is determined to preserve"". The choruses therefore promise: """"I won't let him down ... I won't let him drown ..."""" Harrison later credited Shankar with being ""probably the person who has influenced my life the most"", since ""Indian music was like a stepping-stone to the spiritual path"". Inglis views the song as reflecting Harrison's commitment to ""all the things that India has"
"as an encore at both of the Madison Square Garden shows on 1 August 1971, with the evening performance being selected for inclusion on the ""Concert for Bangladesh"" triple live album. After the familiar introduction to the song, the band ""threw their full weight behind Harrison"", Lavezzoli writes, ""playing the darkest and heaviest music of the show"". On release that December, Jon Landau of ""Rolling Stone"" identified the song as ""the concert's single greatest performance by all concerned"", and added that by the close of the show, the lyrics to Harrison's single were ""no longer an expression of intent but"
"tracks from side four to side six of the original release, together with: A download-only version of the album per the 2005 remaster, with a second bonus track exclusive to iTunes:<ref name=""Marchese/SecondDisc"">Joe Marchese, ""Harrison and Shankar's 'Concert For Bangladesh' Goes Digital"", The Second Disc, 26 July 2011 (retrieved 3 March 2016).</ref> ""The Artists"" ""The Band"" The Hollywood Horns The Soul Choir Original release 2005 reissue The Concert for Bangladesh (album) The Concert for Bangladesh (originally titled The Concert for Bangla Desh) is a live triple album by George Harrison and celebrity friends, released on Apple Records in December 1971 in"
"Shankar stage a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden for the newly created state of Bangladesh, which was undergoing extreme famine conditions. The resulting Concert for Bangladesh, with appearances by Harrison, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and others was the first benefit concert of this magnitude in world history. The concert, record and film have raised millions of dollars for UNICEF. In a documentary about the concert, Taplin tells the famous story of trying to get Eric Clapton (undergoing heroin withdrawal) on stage. In early 1973, Taplin moved to Los Angeles where he was introduced to a young film"
"Akbar Khan, Eric Clapton, the band Badfinger, Klaus Voormann, Jesse Ed Davis, Jim Horn and Jim Keltner. The film was the final part of Harrison's ""pioneering"" aid project for the people of former East Pakistan, following his ""Bangla Desh"" charity single, the UNICEF benefit concerts, and a triple live album of the event credited to ""George Harrison and Friends"". ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" was produced by The Beatles' Apple Films; after delays caused by problems with inadequate footage from the event, it opened in US cinemas in the spring of 1972. The film was released on DVD in 2005 accompanied"
"ten hit in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, and peaked at number 23 on America's ""Billboard"" Hot 100. The recording was co-produced by Phil Spector and features contributions from Leon Russell, Jim Horn, Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner. The Los Angeles session for the song marked the start of two enduring musical associations in Harrison's solo career, with Keltner and Horn. Backed by these musicians and others including Eric Clapton and Billy Preston, Harrison performed ""Bangla Desh"" at the UNICEF concerts, on 1 August 1971, as a rousing encore. In a review of the ""Concert for Bangladesh"" live"
"named after the song. The following musicians are believed to have played on Harrison's original version of ""Beware of Darkness"": ""Beware of Darkness"" was one of the songs Harrison played at the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden on 1 August 1971. Harrison sang the lead vocals for the first two verses, and then Leon Russell took over the lead for the third verse. It was played at both the afternoon and evening performances. The evening performance of the song was included on the album ""Concert for Bangladesh"" as well as the film of the concert. An acoustic version"
"Concert for Bangladesh"" was first issued on CD on 30 July 1991 in America and 19 August in Britain. It was presented as a two-disc set, with significant editing of the breaks between songs. Having stated his disappointment in a 1988 interview that the album had been allowed to go out of print, Harrison recorded a promotional interview on the 20th anniversary of the concerts, to accompany the CD release. Harrison was working on a reissue of the album and film before his death in November 2001. Although the project was due for release the following year,<ref name=""Wallgren/Goldmine"">Mark Wallgren, ""Awaiting"
"the RIAA on 4 January 1972 for sales of over 500,000 units. In March 1973, ""The Concert for Bangladesh""s significance was further underlined when it won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. In Harrison's absence, Ringo Starr attended the awards ceremony in Nashville and carried off a tray of Grammys, one for each of the featured performers. Author Peter Lavezzoli writes that, with the success of the live album and Saul Swimmer's concert documentary, which opened in US cinemas in March 1972, Indian classical music reached its largest Western audience to date through the Concert for Bangladesh. ""The"
"""The Concert for Bangladesh"". During his and Shankar's press conference in New York on 27 July, Harrison had stated that a live album might be ready for release within ten days of the shows. Although this estimate would turn out to be highly optimistic, the following year, in an effort to foil concert bootleggers, Elvis Presley succeeded in delivering a just eight days after his own, much-publicised Madison Square Garden shows. Harrison and co-producer Phil Spector began working on the Bangladesh recordings on 2 August, and work continued there at the Record Plant for around a week. Spector later talked"
"was used.<ref name=""Jon Taplin/CFBD Revisited interviews"">Interview with Jon Taplin, in ""The Concert for Bangladesh Revisited"".</ref> In October 2005, four years after Harrison's death, the remastered ""Concert for Bangladesh"" releases appeared with a photo of him on the cover, although the special-edition DVD retained the original image. ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" was released in the United States on 20 December 1971, and in Britain on 10 January 1972, with the same Apple Records catalogue number (STCX 3385) in both territories. The retail price for the lavishly packaged triple album was set at $12.98 in America and an extraordinarily high £5.50 in"
"not perform live again until his 1974 North American tour with Shankar. By that point, the Bangladesh Liberation War had long ended, with the defeat of the Pakistani army in December 1971 by the allied forces of Bangladesh and India, but Bangladesh was now experiencing a devastating famine that would account for up to 1.5 million lives. During a concert in Los Angeles on 11 November, Harrison responded to requests for the song ""Bangla Desh"" with a suggestion that the audience instead chant ""Krishna, Krishna, Krishna"" and use the positive power of mantra to help the Bangladeshi population. Harrison biographer"
"doing something for a cause"". It was also the first time that Keltner played on a George Harrison session, the two musicians having already worked together on Lennon's ""Imagine"" album (1971). The ""Bangla Desh"" session was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, with the pair remaining ""as brothers"", Keltner has said, until Harrison's death in 2001. Together with Clapton, Preston, Bob Dylan and the group Badfinger, all these musicians joined Harrison and Shankar on stage at Madison Square Garden. Ravi Shankar cut a benefit disc of his own at this time, the Harrison-produced ""Joi Bangla"" EP. The A-side featured two"
"to staging the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, New York, on Sunday, 1 August. Six weeks of frantic activity ensued as Harrison flew between New York, Los Angeles and London, making preparations and recruiting other musicians to join him and Shankar for the shows. While conceding that Harrison was no ""natural sloganeer"" in the manner of his former bandmate John Lennon, author Robert Rodriguez has written: ""if any ex-Fab had the cachet with his fan base to solicit good works, it was the spiritual Beatle."" Foreign journalists had been deported from East Pakistan shortly before the Pakistani army's"
"of New York, the University of California, Los Angeles, and being guest lecturer at other colleges and universities, including the Ali Akbar College of Music. In late 1970, the London Symphony Orchestra invited Shankar to compose a concerto with ""sitar"". ""Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra"" was performed with André Previn as conductor and Shankar playing the ""sitar"". Shankar performed at the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971, held at Madison Square Garden in New York. After the musicians had tuned up on stage for over a minute, the crowd of rock-music fans broke into applause, to which the amused Shankar"
"permanent legacy.""<ref name=""Ginell/AM"">Richard S. Ginell, ""George Harrison ""The Concert for Bangladesh (Bonus Track)"""", AllMusic (retrieved 9 April 2015)</ref> Writing in ""Rolling Stone"" that year, Anthony DeCurtis said: ""The Concert for Bangladesh is rightly enshrined in rock history as the model for Band Aid, Live Aid, Live 8 and every other superstar benefit concert of the last three decades ... In emphasizing the concert's idealism, however, it's easy to overlook what a musical gem this two-disc set is."" Dan Ouellette of ""Billboard"" considered that ""The star-studded package holds up well as a live greatest-hits collection"", before concluding: ""But the revelation is"
"3, 2007. Saul Swimmer Saul Swimmer (April 25, 1936 – March 3, 2007) was an American documentary film director and producer best known for the movie ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" (1972), the George Harrison-led Madison Square Garden show that was one of the first all-star benefits in rock music. He was also a co-producer of The Beatles' 1970 documentary ""Let It Be"". Born to a Uniontown, Pennsylvania, family that included a sister, Esther, and three brothers, Wolford and Alvin, and Herbert, Swimmer earned a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in nearby Pittsburgh. He began directing in his early twenties,"
"continued to massacre Bengali students, intellectuals, politicians, civil servants and military defectors in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, while the Mukti Bahini and other Bengali guerilla forces created strong resistance throughout the country. During the war, an estimated 300,000 to three million people were killed and several million people took shelter in neighboring India. Global public opinion turned against Pakistan as news of the atrocities spread; the Bangladesh movement was supported by prominent political and cultural figures in the West, including Ted Kennedy, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Victoria Ocampo and André Malraux. The Concert for Bangladesh was held at"
"Harrison and Shankar's Bangladesh relief project. Despite the cost, the album was an immediate commercial success. In America, it spent six weeks at number 2 on the ""Billboard"" Top LPs chart, kept from the top by Don McLean's ""American Pie"", which was one of the top-selling albums there for 1972. On the other US charts, compiled by ""Cash Box"" and ""Record World"", the live album peaked at number 2 and number 1, respectively. In the UK, ""The Concert for Bangladesh"" became Harrison's second number 1 album, after ""All Things Must Pass"" in early 1971. The album was certified gold by"
"Bangla Desh (song) ""Bangla Desh"" is a song by English musician George Harrison. It was released as a non-album single in July 1971, to raise awareness for the millions of refugees from the country formerly known as East Pakistan, following the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the outbreak of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Harrison's inspiration for the song came from his friend Ravi Shankar, a Bengali musician, who approached Harrison for help in trying to alleviate the suffering. ""Bangla Desh"" has been described as ""one of the most cogent social statements in music history"" and helped gain international support for Bangladeshi"
"lay dying in 1970, Harrison gained extra motivation from ""a situation his fame and commercial cache ""could"" do something to alleviate"". As a B-side for the hastily written ""Bangla Desh"", which he composed to bring attention to the cause, Harrison chose to record ""Deep Blue"". In the Bangladesh context of 1971, author Bruce Spizer writes, the song made a suitable, ""intimately chilling"" companion to the hard-charging lead track. Harrison recorded ""Deep Blue"" in Los Angeles, at the Record Plant West on 4–5 July, while organising the benefit concerts to be held at New York's Madison Square Garden on 1 August."
"from the Concert for Bangladesh.<ref name=""ContraBand/BigBop"">""Big Bop Baby"", Contra Band Music, 4 May 2012 (retrieved 7 November 2013).</ref> Shankar joined him late in the show, during which Harrison also plugged ""Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra"", Shankar's recently released collaboration with André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra. On 24 November, Shankar and Harrison filmed an appearance on ""The David Frost Show"", where they again discussed the film and Harrison gave a rare demonstration on sitar. Two days later, Shankar performed at Carnegie Hall, accompanied by Rakha and Chakravarty, giving his first New York concert since the Concert for Bangladesh shows"
"independence by establishing the name of the fledgling nation around the world. In 2005, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified the song's success in personalising the Bangladesh crisis, through its emotive description of Shankar's request for help. ""Bangla Desh"" appeared at the height of Harrison's popularity as a solo artist, following the break-up of the Beatles and the acclaim afforded his 1970 triple album ""All Things Must Pass"". It was pop music's first charity single, and its release took place three days before the Harrison-sponsored Concert for Bangladesh shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. The single became a top"