S-gG-M-P-D-N-S

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A Ravi Shankar creation taking the form of ‘Yaman with komal ga instead of Re’ (‘DoGa’: ‘Double-Gandhar’) – which, despite never having been released in classical form, may have left its mark on modern music as a possible source for The Beatles’ Blue Jay Way, composed by Shankar’s sitar student George Harrison in 1967. At least, this is my conclusion – musicologists have long speculated as to which raga the song’s curious ‘Lydian #2’ scale form is based on, with prominent suggestions including Marwa, Multani, and the Carnatic Ranjani – but none of these fit the melody like DoGa Kalyan does (verse: SgMg SgG; gMDM gDP; chorus: DNSN; DNRSNSN, DNSN, DSNDPMG). The full answer is, however, a little murkier when it comes to raga metaphysics – see writeup below for my full explanation, including context on how Harrison composed it (…it’s not surprising that the answer was missed: as far as I can tell, the raga had never been catalogued before the release of this page in late 2025). While I cannot ascertain precisely when Shankar conceived of the raga, he would have come across a similar concept in the ‘tivra Re’ (‘shatshruti ri’/R3) of Carnatic music, equivalent to the Hindustani komal ga position or the Western Augmented 2nd – indeed, DoGa Kalyan matches the South Indian Kosalam (mela #71). As an avid rotator of ragas, he may also have encountered the scale as a murchana of Kirwani and Basant Mukhari (in jazz parlance, the Harmonic Minor modes). Whatever its genesis, Shankar never released a ‘pure’ classical recording – however, he did feature it as Section III: Scherzo of his 2010 Symphony, setting jhaptal motifs of SSPP MMPP MGgSS ggGG ggGMP against cascading string ostinatos and sitar cadenzas played by his daughter Anouskha. As per the album’s liner notes: “The melodic base is a creation of Ravi Shankar known as DoGa Kalyan…From the outset, rhythmic cycles moving in multiple metres are piled one upon the other, producing a hypnotic effect” (n.b. the other three movements – Allegro, Lento, and Finale – are set in Zila Kafi, Ahir Bhairav, and Pilu Banjara). Compare to other members of the highly exclusive ‘double-Ga, tivra Ma’ club including Faridi Todi, featuring a unique SrgGMd ascent sequence, and Rasikpriya, which also takes a ‘tivra Dha’/#6 – and also browse other Shankar-created ragas (e.g. Bairagi, Jogeshwari, Parameshwari, Mohankauns, Ahir Lalit, Pancham se Gara).

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• Raga Megalist (365+) •

राग दोगा कल्याण

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• Hindustani Raga Index •

—Anoushka Shankar & London Philharmonic (2010)—

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[themes, e.g. 2:38] (N)S, Gg(Gg) SS, Gg(Gg) SS; (D)PM (D)PMGg (M)GgSg; GgG PMDND PM PMG G(gG); G PMG (G)gG; gGgSg…

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• Blue Jay Way: origins •

Analysing the DoGa Kalyan connection…

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Mystery has persisted as to which raga may have inspired the oddball melodies of Blue Jay Way (as a fellow guitar-to-sitar convert named George, I’ve definitely wondered…). Musicologists and Beatles researchers have offered an assortment of suggestions in the half-century since the song’s release – but I believe that DoGa Kalyan is the best answer, albeit with a few caveats around how to interpret the concept of ‘raga’ itself. Here, I will explain why, with reference to Harrison’s broader Hindustani study.

 

Hailed by critics as “a haunted house of a hit, adding an ethereal, creepy mythos to the City of Angels”, Blue Jay Way was conceived in Aug 1967 by a sleep-deprived Harrison as he waited in the Los Angeles fog to meet press officer Derek Taylor – naming it after the Hollywood Hills street he was staying on (“There’s a fog upon L.A.; And my friends have lost their way…”). Recorded a few weeks later with a distinctive phasing effect on the Hammond organ, the song was released on the Magical Mystery Tour EP, paired with one of the film’s hazier, more dislocated scenes:

 

—Blue Jay Way (Magical Mystery Tour)—

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“Footage of The Beatles filming inserts for Blue Jay Way in Ringo’s backyard from November 1967. All four are seen playing the cello, with Paul, George, and Ringo playing football together while John continues…then adding fireworks to the cello and setting it off!”

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Given the track’s clear Indian influences and general air of mystery, it is unsurprising that Beatles researchers have speculated as to the source of its melodies. As a raga musicologist, my ears were immediately piqued by the bizarre ‘Lydian #2’ scale form (1-#2-3-#4-5-6-7), a rotation of the Harmonic Minor so rare that I still can’t find another Western song that unambiguously showcases it – and, despite the many hundreds of scales used in the Subcontinent, not one that seemed to match with any raga I knew. Intrigued, I had to dig deeper…

 

Alan W. Pollack, famous for publishing breakdowns of all 112 Beatles songs, released his analysis in 1997 (Notes on Blue Jay Way). Stating that “the style of this song is surely derived from Indian music”, he correctly identifies several raga elements, including “the use of a drone bass” (see tanpura) and how the intro “is played ad libitum, without meter” (see alap). He summarises the scale form as “highly unusual…[with] a tangy, off-center augmented 4th…this has its precedents in Indian ragas” (n.b. although the #4 interval may sound off-centre, it is actually the exact midpoint of the octave: see tone wheel). While no specific ragas are suggested, he points out that the scale can be seen as a mixture of Cmaj7 and Cdim7 (1-3-5-7 + 1-b3-b5-bb7 = 1-#2-3-#4-5-6-7):

 

(Comparison: Cmaj7, Cdim7, Blue Jay Way)

Simon Leng, author of the acclaimed 2006 book While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison, hones in on the Hindustani connection, stating that “Blue Jay Way explores the structures of Indian music just as Within You Without You debates its philosophical roots…Harrison was working at a sophisticated level of extrapolating Indian scales to the Western setting, something no one else had done…” (n.b. jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott may take issue with this final point). He highlights an intriguing connection to Raag Marwa: “in the mid-1960s, Harrison…met Ravi Shankar and one of his English pupils John Barham. The evening ‘Raga Marwa’ was among Harrison’s favorite pieces of music…there were legendary recordings of it by Ravi Shankar and by Ali Akbar Khan…George also had a never-released piano interpretation of the raga by Barham, which had a significant impact on Harrison and Lennon.”

 

Barham, who went on to collaborate with Harrison many times over the following decades, states in correspondence with Leng that Harrison “acknowledged [my] piano adaptation of Raga Marwa as an influence on Blue Jay Way” (p.26). But while Harrison’s associations with Raag Marwa are undeniable (he eventually adapted it for his final studio album as Marwa Blues, winning a posthumous 2004 Grammy for his efforts), the melodic connections between the song and the raga are less clear.

 

Marwa is an idiosyncratic six-note form (1-b2-3-#4-6-7), and while a few of the song’s elements can be shoe-horned into it, its vital passages cannot – e.g. Marwa strictly disallows the #2/b3 required to sing the main opening line; as well as the tension-relieving perfect 5th at the end of both the verse and chorus (listen for yourself in the clip below). So, while Barham’s setting of Marwa may well have provided Harrison with general inspiration when it came to arranging ragas, it seems implausible that Raag Marwa itself is the source of the song’s melodies. (n.b. I also take minor issue with Leng’s appraisal that Blue Jay Way “reflects the ‘microtones’ of Indian music scales” – while sruti microtones are indeed vital to raga, I don’t really hear them in the song…).

 

(Comparison: Raag Marwa vs. Blue Jay Way)

David Reck, an avant-garde composer, Amherst College ethnomusicology professor, and longtime student of South Indian veena virtuoso Ranganayaki Rajagopalan, adds further context on Harrison’s L.A. trip in his 1985 paper Beatles Orientalis: Influences from Asia in a Popular Song Tradition: “In the summer of 1967, the year of the flower children, Harrison, increasingly restless and searching for a spiritual anchor, traveled to the United States for a Ravi Shankar concert and visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury to check out the hippies and their scene. He was not impressed. His stay in Los Angeles, however, did result in the composition of one of his most interesting Indian songs, Blue Jay Way…[which] uses Western instruments to create a sound that is, in this case, Indian throughout…characteristic phrases recur with raga-like insistence, and gliding and bent pitches relate to gamaka ornamentation.”

 

Reck correctly identifies that the scale “fits within the South Indian raga system [as] melakarta #71, Kosalam” (melakarta: the 72-scale derivation wheel used in Carnatic raga) – but sensibly stops short of claiming it as the track’s actual source. Kosalam is still a seldom-heard raga even in South India, with only a few formal recordings available and the most popular YouTube renditions having just a few thousand views at most. Furthermore, Harrison’s training under Ravi Shankar was in the North Indian ‘Hindustani’ system, which, while sharing deep historic roots with its South Indian ‘Carnatic’ counterpart, has been sonically and conceptually distinct for at least four centuries (predominantly due to the cultural interchange of the Mughal Empire period, which brought an infusion of Islamic ideas to North India but never exerted as much direct control over the South).

 

As far as I can tell, no album renditions of Kosalam would have been available in the West prior to the song’s Aug 1967 genesis. And while I can’t technically rule out that Harrison might have heard it at a concert, this is highly unlikely, given the raga’s Carnatic obscurity coupled with the dominance of Hindustani music amongst global listeners of the era (even today, if you’ve heard an Indian classical musician, chances are that they hail from the Hindustani tradition: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Zakir Hussain, Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Bismillah Khan, etc). So, while Reck is correct that Blue Jay Way is congruent with Kosalam, he is also wise in avoiding any causal connection between them.

 

Strangely, a later essay by Reck, published in Olivier Julien’s 2008 book Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today, suggests a different South Indian raga instead, describing Blue Jay Way as being “set in a scale unlike those of Western music, but familiar to any Indian musician conversant with the raga system: a diminished triad resolving to a major third…then transposed up a minor third [1-b3-b5-b3, 1-b3-3; b3-b5-6-b5; b3-6-5]. The resulting raga-like scale has a parallel in the south-Indian mode known as Raga Ranjani” – which he stave-notates in Fig. 5.2 (“The scale of ‘Blue Jay Way’; south-Indian ranjani raga”) as C-D-Eb-E-F#-G-A-B-C [1-2-b3-3-#4-5-6-7: essentially, the BJW scale with an added major 2nd].

 

This is confusing: the commonly-accepted form of Ranjani, simplified in the audio clip below, is fairly close to the BJW scale, sharing five of its tones (1-b3-#4-6-7), but it features an additional major 2nd (absent in BJW), and – unlike the ‘Ranjani’ of Reck’s notation – omits the major 3rd and perfect 5th (vital to BJW):

 

(Comparison: Raga Ranjani vs. Blue Jay Way)

I’m genuinely not sure what is going on here: Reck correctly matched BJW to the Kosalam scale back in 1985 – but in his 2008 essay, he makes no mention of Kosalam at all, instead including a mis-notated form of Ranjani, a raga which, according to all sources I can find, is incongruent with the track right from its opening line. Ranjani, having six tones, is neither a mode or a subset of the right scale, and lacks the vital ‘#2-3’ pairing (arguably BJW’s most distinctive element) – and however hard I listen to recordings of it, I can’t pick out anything clearly resembling a “diminished triad resolving to a major third” (Ranjani has no major 3rd).

 

[I also query his appraisal that either of the Ranjani or Kosalam scale forms would be “familiar to any Indian musician conversant with the raga system” – Hindustani musicians would likely recognise neither, and Carnatic musicians do not typically learn Ranjani until deep into their training, let alone Kosalam. An experienced Carnatic musician with keen ears would likely pick up on Blue Jay Way’s Kosalam-type shape, but Reck overstates things: after all, he is an experienced Carnatic musician, with over 40 years of veena training in Chennai, but still seems to have become confused here].

(Los Angeles’ Blue Jay Way today)

Walter Everett, NEA Fellow and Music Professor at the University of Michigan, published a landmark pair of Beatles books at the turn of the millennium (The Beatles As Musicians Vol. 1 & 2). He links BJW with two Indian forms: the Southern Kosalam, discussed above, and the Northern Multani (p.141: “the unusual Lydian scale altered with an occasional b3…related to ragas Kosalam and Multani, but not replicating their practice”). Multani, a challenging afternoon raga, is, again, no match for the track’s melodies: being equivalent to the tones 1-b2-b3-#4-5-b6-7, and thus omitting BJW’s essential major 3rd & major 6th while including an extraneous b2 & b6 (hear how different they sound below). Everett does not elaborate on the Multani connection, or comment on the basic tonal differences between Multani and Kosalam.

 

(Comparison: Raag Multani vs. Blue Jay Way)

Other Beatles analysts have also opined on Blue Jay Way with varying levels of accuracy. David Bennett, an online theory educator who released a Beatles-themed breakdown in 2021 (How the Beatles used Indian music theory), does well to identify several Subcontinental elements in the band’s music amidst a few conceptual confusions (e.g. “a raga is much like a Western scale…and most ragas use the exact same notes as Western scales”). He briefly mentions BJW (“based around a drone of C, but unlike Indian music, the chord type pivots…”), without naming a raga. Xander Slikker of the Learning Music Skills channel (The Beatles Most Underrated Song) discusses “how the harmonic series and the Lydian mode create a mysterious musical world”, but misses the mark in focusing on the role of the low organ drone – which, while tanpura-like, lacks its complex overtonal profile and so does less to recolour the chords above it.

 

Ian MacDonald, author of the bestselling 1998 book Revolution in the Head, crudely summarises BJW‘s tonality as “C major (minor, diminished)” – vague enough to be meaningless – along with a scathing review (p.269): “It numbingly fails to transcend the weary boredom that inspired it…Harrison had yet to escape the Beatles’ summer doldrums, and his contribution to Magical Mystery Tour was as unfocused and monotonous as most of the group’s other music of this period.” [To me, ‘monotonous’ is a uniquely ill-fitting term here given the song’s famously exotic tonal material. Then again, Paul McCartney once described MacDonald’s magnum opus as “a kind of toilet book…I’ll come across [something] and I go, ‘Well, that’s not true’…But these ‘facts’ are going down as some sort of musical history. There are millions of them, and I know for a fact that a lot of them are incorrect.”]

(Emperor Akbar and Miyan Tansen seek wisdom from Swami Haridas)

By now, I was more confused than when I’d started. While I’d picked up some interesting context along the way – particularly the influence of Barham’s Marwa composition – I was no closer to finding a plausible raga match. Marwa, Multani, and Ranjani do not fit with the song’s basic melodies, and, although Kosalam is congruent, it is highly unlikely that Harrison had ever come across such a rare South Indian form.

 

Eventually, I stumbled upon what seemed like a breakthrough. While documenting rarities for my Masterlist of 1000+ Ragas, I remembered that I’d seen an unfamiliar raga name on a 2010 symphonic recording by Ravi Shankar – ‘DoGa Kalyan’. The title alone was intriguing: Kalyan family ragas derive their melodic core from the Lydian-congruent Raag Yaman, and ‘DoGa’ indicated ‘Double-Gandhar’, implying a modification of the scale to accommodate both variants of the 3rd degree (b3-3; equivalent to #2-3). I listen-checked, and yes: DoGa Kalyan exactly matched Blue Jay Way’s ‘Lydian #2‘ tonality:

—Raag DoGa Kalyan (Ravi Shankar)—

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“The melodic base is a creation of Ravi Shankar known as DoGa Kalyan…From the outset, rhythmic cycles moving in multiple metres are piled one upon the other, producing a hypnotic effect” (Symphony III: Scherzo)

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The album’s liner notes confirmed the raga as a Ravi creation rather than an obscure traditional form – and Oliver Craske’s excellent 2020 Shankar biography (Indian Sun) revealed that he had explored it before as part of a 2004 collaboration with London’s Bhavan Centre (Sanmelan: ‘meeting of musicians’). This got me excited – not only was this the only raga from Harrison’s Hindustani tradition to fit with the song, but it was created by his own guru too! Further listenthroughs confirmed the sonic similarities: particularly the consecutive use of the twin-Ga (e.g. #2-3; 3-#2) – highly unusual for North India, where a more typical approach would be to separate the two tones, with the higher appearing in ascending lines and the lower in descent (audible in Shankar’s Pilu renditions), or to ‘sandwich’ another note inbetween them (as with Jog’s ‘3-4-b3’ phrase).

 

Then again, sonic resemblance is not proof of causal influence. I first went to India to study Hindustani music fifteen years ago, and have been a full-time raga researcher for the past five – but had never listened to DoGa Kalyan before 2025 (…I think it was about the 700th raga catalogued in my project). So what were the chances Harrison had heard it? Could the uncanny scale match just be a coincidence? Here, things get a little conceptually murkier…

(Harrison and Shankar in the late 1960s)

One obvious issue is the 37-year gap between the first releases of BJW and DoGa Kalyan (1967 vs. 2004). However, Shankar is known to have composed several ragas which he never got around to recording at all (e.g. Kaushik Todi, performed in the 1970s but never formally released). Furthermore, he spent the 1960s in a phase of prolific raga creation, and seemed keen to proactively share his discoveries with Harrison – dreaming up Kameshwari, Rangeshwari, and Gangeshwari just a few months after BJW’s inception, and playing their derived partner Parameshwari to Harrison soon after in the Hollywood living room of a mutual friend (a meeting that led to the Concert for Bangladesh).

 

Shankar – one of the few North Indian artists of the era to have studied the Carnatic system in depth – had already encountered the ‘independent twin-Ga’ idea in scales 31-36 and 67-72 of the melakarta (Carnatic music allows for a free-functioning #2, whereas Hindustani music does not). He would at least have played through all these scales prior to 1967 (see Craske p.129), and could not have helped but intuitively relate them to more familiar forms as he did so: e.g. Sulini as ‘DoGa Bilawal’; Gangeyabhushani as ‘DoGa Nat Bhairav’; and Kosalam as ‘DoGa Kalyan’ (in Western terms: Major #2, Harmonic Major #2, and Lydian #2).

 

Similarly, as an avid rotator of ragas, he may also have encountered the scale as a murchana (modal rotation) of Kirwani – a Southern form he had helped introduce to the North over the preceding decade, equivalent to the Harmonic Minor, a scale Harrison seemed to be familiar with (to speculate a little based on my own experiences: the idea of ‘rotating common scales’ often comes up when guitarists talk theory with raga musicians, as ‘murchana/modality’ is one of the few concepts which basically works the same way in both traditions. While I doubt that DoGa Kalyan was transmitted this way, I wouldn’t be surprised if they at least discussed it at some point, especially given Harrison’s love for Shankar’s murchana-derived Parameshwari, released only a few months after BJW).

 

Then again, just because Shankar had experimented with the DoGa Kalyan scale form by the time he taught Harrison, this doesn’t prove that Harrison had ever heard it – in fact, there is no definitive proof that BJW is even based on a specific raga at all. While he didn’t tend to namecheck the ragas behind Beatles songs, likely due to their non-traditional settings, other prominent instances tend to match with common ragas from the normal sitar curriculum (e.g. Love Me Do: Kafi; Within You Without You: Khamaj). So why am I convinced of DoGa Kalyan’s relevance? Here, we must delve a little further into the metaphysics of raga definition…

The hallway of 1567 Blue Jay Way: the Hammond organ is located right behind the door above the stairwell in the centre (photo credit: Electric Earl)

The main purpose of Harrison’s L.A. visit was to study with Shankar at his newly-opened Kinnara School of Music, just a 10-minute drive away from Blue Jay Way. For the past 18 months, he had, “aside from in his work with the Beatles, abandoned the guitar to master the sitar” (Leng 2006, p.30-32). Raga was clearly on his mind as he waited for Derek Taylor after his flight, passing the time on a Hammond organ: as discussed above, the song features tanpura-like drones, a free-time alap introduction, and a mantra-like 29-time repetition of the final line, and is absent of the clear chord changes that mark most Beatles tunes.

 

However he ultimately derived its strange melodies, his intuitions in those moments would have been guided by the ragas he did know – undoubtedly including Yaman (a.k.a. ‘Kalyan’), the first of North India’s ten ‘reference scales’ and virtually always one of the earliest ragas taught to beginners. Harrison doesn’t appear to have written any Lydian-flavoured melodies prior to his sitar study – but Kalyan phrases turn up in BJW’s vocal lines, such as DNRSN (‘please don’t you be very long’) and the concluding flourish of SNDPMG (‘I may be asleep’). While some have commented that BJW’s two chords are easy to recreate using the Hammond C-3’s chord buttons, this is of limited relevance: the melody, which defines the song, would still have to have been composed manually, note-by-note (and in any case, the whole purpose of the chord-organ is to make virtually any chord easy to play: even if he did use the buttons, he still had to choose those two out of the instrument’s 96 options…). His fingers may even have already explored Kalyan’s scale shape on his own harmonium keyboard.

 

So, although BJW may or may not have been directly inspired by Ravi Shankar showing him DoGa Kalyan itself, I am confident in stating that it was directly influenced by Harrison’s understanding of the Kalyan scale taught to him by Shankar. And, given that he would clearly have noticed the outlying D#, he would have on some fundamental level recognised his new melody as a type of ‘Double-Ga Kalyan’. This may seem somewhat abstruse, but the bounds of raga definition can be far hazier than the neat dividing lines of Western traditions – if an artist plays a Kalyan raga with double-Ga, they are by definition playing some kind of ‘DoGa Kalyan’. In other words, Harrison utilised his familiarity with Kalyan ragas to play a ‘double-Ga’ form of the Kalyan scale – but the extent to which this qualifies as a case of ‘shared essence’ with Shankar’s incarnation is a matter of opinion…

(Opening scene of the Blue Jay Way video)

I hope this somewhat messy answer doesn’t seem mildly unsatisfying (…especially after reading this far). My main intention in making the claim – and in digging so deep in the first place – is to illuminate some of the idiosyncrasies of raga itself, and to highlight some of the fascinating dilemmas around how we can interpret them. To me, this is probably what Harrison would have wanted, as he sat at the organ running raga melodies through his hands in preparation for his classes with Shankar. Naturally, further conundrums remain: for example I may have been too firm in outright rejecting Kosalam’s influence, as despite its obscurity, it may well have left some imprint on Shankar’s thinking via his earlier melakarta study – and, while he doubtless would have noticed the DoGa Kalyan scale match, I don’t know if he ever shared any reflections on BJW.

 

Perhaps the real mystery is why the issue has seemed to confuse so many researchers who otherwise appear to produce excellent work. The nuances of raga theory may be complex, but the task of scale-matching is not – and many of the melodic assertions discussed above simply do not fit the track (in fact, none of the suggestions except Kosalam are much of a match at all). Nobody in academia appears to have reached out to an Indian musician for direct input, instead relying on dubious secondary accounts – and, most remarkably, none of their writings explicitly mention Kalyan as a possible source at all, despite its melodic proximity and central place on the sitar curriculum. It’s no surprise that the congruence with Ravi’s DoGa Kalyan recordings wasn’t spotted – as far as I can tell, the raga’s note-set had never been publicly catalogued before the Sep 2025 release of this page – but any competent Hindustani musician would likely have picked up on the track’s general Kalyan flavours (…in fact this was commented on by two sitar learners in the Chandrakantha forum back in 2003: “I keep wanting to play Blue Jay Way instead of my exercises, cuz the Kalyan thaat reminds me of it!”).

 

This is not the place to further analyse how this state of affairs has come about – but suffice to say that the frustratingly variable quality of English-language raga musicology was one of the motivations for me writing my own Raga Index, in collaboration with master musicians from across North India. And while I stop short of endorsing everything he says, I advise my fellow raga researchers to consider Rajan Parrikar’s definition of the term ‘ethnopimp’ (“Ethnopimps are found loitering in Western universities…There are PhD theses, careers, and tenure to be had…Never mind that the titmouse wouldn’t recognize swara even if it bit off his or her buttcheeks…”).

(‘Shiva, Vishnu, & Brahma Adoring Kali’, c.1740)

Similarly, I also take issue with how certain Beatles analysts seem to feel a need to cast Harrison as some kind of sitar prodigy (Leng: “an immediate and almost innate understanding and empathy with Indian music…he understood the phrasing, rhythmic, and expressive nuances in great detail…”; “George knew Indian instruments and musical theory inside-out…a very advanced example of cross-cultural musical synthesis”; “The way in which he incorporated Indian inflections into his slide guitar style was unprecedented…certain Indian instruments are actually played using a sort of slide, the one I’m thinking of is the veena.” [n.b. the veena, South India’s most famous instrument, is not played with a slide]).

 

I love Harrison, both as a musician and because he funded Monty Python’s Life of Brian – but he never possessed high-level sitar technique, and his Indian innovations do not draw from raga’s more complex theoretical layers. As a fellow sitarist of mediocre skill, this is not at all a criticism: to me, the fact he could bring about a revolution in popular music anyway is a testament to the unique spark of his creative intuitions, as well as to the transformative potential of raga’s most basic building blocks (on that note: hit me up for Zoom lessons…).

 

In other words, you don’t need to be a raga master to do powerful things with its ideas. More broadly, it is profound to know that Harrison’s innovations derive from his own imagination, experiences, and hard work, rather than thinking that he must have been a prodigy to access this realm at all. Who wants to believe that creativity is the rarefied preserve of innate geniuses?

 

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“When George Harrison came to me, I didn’t know what to think, but he really wanted to learn. I never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion.” (Ravi Shankar)

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Much like ragas themselves, Blue Jay Way has now developed its own lineage, with a colourful assortment of covers and reworks arriving over the past six decades. Almost as soon as it was out, it was re-recorded by ‘Lord Sitar’ (not, as was rumoured, Harrison’s alter ego; rather the alias of session guitarist and early sitar convert Big Jim Sullivan) – as well as by jazz horn player Bud Shank, who would later team up with Ravi Shankar on the Pather Panchali soundtrack. Colin Newman’s haunting post-punk interpretation from 1982 is particularly effective (in his words, the Beatles “need to be rescued from the clammy clutches of the heritage industry”), as are the lush timbres of alternative rock violinist Tracy Bonham – while the apocalyptic rendition by “wall-of-noise improvisational jazz band” Borbetomagus is harder to decipher. Secret Machines recorded it for the Across the Universe soundtrack in 2007, and Siouxsie and the Banshees have performed it live, as have Beatles cover act The Analogues and multi-instrumentalist Dosh – and avant-garde hip-hop act Death Grips sampled it in reverse on 2012’s Double Helix. My personal favourite is a live take by Algerian jazz bassist Michel Benita (below), where its strange motifs are passed back-and-forth between trumpet, electric guitar, and Japanese koto zither.

 

Naturally, the track holds further mysteries. Many sources state that nobody knows who played the cello part (although Tony Sokol claims that it was Peter Willison, “who came to the session straight from a show at the Albert Hall, and was still in his tux”) – and I still haven’t found a recording of Barham’s Marwa composition. Meanwhile, more open-minded fans continue to see the song as proof of the ‘Paul is Dead’ theory (Sokol: “According to conspiracy enthusiasts, the song is filled with coffin nails. If you listen carefully to the backing vocals…they appear to sing ‘Paul is bloody’..and the phrase ‘don’t be long’ is interpreted to mean [his] replacement didn’t ‘belong’ in the group…”). [While patently nonsense, I don’t want to be too harsh on confused fans – honestly, their reasoning here isn’t a whole lot shakier than some of the inferences made by my fellow musicologists above. Although I don’t want to be too harsh on them either: raga is a notoriously confusing zone for Western ears, and I’ve missed plenty of things in the past…]

 

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—Blue Jay Way (Michael Benita, 2010)—

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“I told [Derek Taylor] that the house was in Blue Jay Way…There was a fog, and it got later and later. To keep myself awake…I wrote a song about waiting for him. There was a little Hammond organ in the corner of this rented house…I messed around on it and the song came.” (George Harrison, 1968)

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—Further Learnings & LLM BS—

• Blue Jay Way: For more oddities and rarities around the track itself, check out the playful outtakes filmed in Ringo’s backyard, as well as isolated studio stems (and why not listen in reverse?) – also see inside the house Harrison wrote the song in at 1567 Blue Jay Way (“Amazingly, the organ he used is still there..but last time someone plugged it in it started to smoke…”).
• Harrison & Shankar: Aside from the sources linked above, see their 1971 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, as well as footage from their lessons (playing Bhairav), a later VH1 duet (Prabhujee), and their 1997 Chants of India collaboration – plus Shankar’s scathing initial appraisal of Harrison’s playing prior to studying with him (for more on the sitar, see here).
• Hindustani raga: See the Homepage and Glossary pages of this project for more general resources, and to go deeper on the metaphysics of raga, see the tale of Ali Akbar Khan’s Chandranandan (also check out my Guitar World article Up to 11: A full harmonic-melodic analysis of Spinal Tap’s genre-bending roots in jazz, J.S. Bach, and Indian raga for a very silly critique of reading too much into musical happenstance, or assuming that everything comes from India…)

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Bonus: Out of curiosity I also asked ChatGPT, mainly to see how ‘confidently wrong’ it would be this time (…I implore you, please do not get your music theory info from AI). Rather than the usual trick of just presenting me with a poorly-summarised version of the top Google results, it invented a whole new answer, seemingly with no connection to any source at all: [Prompt: “Which Indian raga was the inspiration for Blue Jay Way by the Beatles?”] “The Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way”…was heavily inspired by Indian classical music, particularly the raga Khamaj and its Carnatic counterpart Harikambhoji. Harrison built much of “Blue Jay Way” around C Mixolydian, echoing the flavor of Khamaj.” [Prompt: “What is your source for the above?”] “I can’t find a reliable scholarly source. My assertion was speculative and based on stylistic similarities (the use of a flattened 7th, a drone, modal structure, especially the C–Bb pull that resembles Khamaj), rather than on documentary evidence…”. 

 

When pressed further, it presented me with a detailed set of melodic examples as ‘proof’ of this answer, despite the obvious mismatch between the Mixolydian and the actual song, the complete lack of any b7 or “C-Bb pull”, and the extreme vagueness of terms such as “modal structure” (my charitable guess is that it mixed up Blue Jay Way and Within You Without You, although even then the answers don’t really make sense: this isn’t even the fun kind of hallucination…). Another reminder to avoid, resist, and stigmatise the pernicious spread of AI slop – especially when it comes to such rich, complex, and human endeavours as music.

 

• Classifiers •

Explore hidden inter-raga connections: swara geometries, melodic features, murchana sets, ragangas, & more (also see the Full Tag List):

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Swaras: -4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10+

Sapta: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Poorvang: SRGM | SRG | SRM | SGM

Uttarang: PDNS | PDS | PNS | DNS

Varjit: Re | Ga | Ma | Pa | Dha | Ni

Double: rR | gG | mM | dD | nN

Thaat: 10 | 32 | Enclosed | Inexact

Chal: All-shuddha | All-komal | Ma-tivra

Gaps: Anh. | Hemi. | 3-row | 4-row | 5-row

Symmetries: Mirror | Rotation | Palindr.

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Aroha: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Avroh: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Jati: Equal | Balanced | Av.+1 | Av.+2

Samay: Morning | Aftern. | Eve. | Night

Murchana: Bhup. | Bihag | Bilaw. | Charu.

Raganga: Bhairav | Malhar | Kan. | Todi

Construction: Jod | Mishra | Oddball

Origin: Ancient | Carnatic | Modern

Dominance: Poorvang | Uttarang

Prevalence: A-list | Prachalit | Aprach.

• Prakriti: (none found)

Also see other shadav ragas which omit Re

–Swara Geometries–

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• Core form: S–gG–M–P–D–N–S

• Reverse: SrgmMdDS

• Negative: 2-3-3-1-3

• Imperfect: 3 (ga, Ma, Pa)

• Detached: 1 (ga)

• Symmetries: none

• Murchanas: Kirwani set

–Global Translations–

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• Carnatic: ~Kosalam (mela #71)

S-R₃-G₃-M₂-P-D₂-N₃-S

• Jazz: Lydian #2

1-#2-3-#4-5-6-7-8

• Pitch classes (‘fret-jumps’):

0-3-4-6-7-9-11-0

(3–1–2–1–2–2–1)

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o • • o o • o o • o • o o

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• Tanpura: Sa–Pa

• Names: DoGa Kalyan, Do-Gandhar Kalyan

• Transliterations: Hindi (दोगा कल्याण)

—Shubhendra Rao & Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León (2020)—