WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU

Harrison | Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

JOHN SCOFIELD: “[This] was my introduction to ‘faux’ Indian music — and some of the sounds that we string benders use all the time. As a guitarist, I was inspired by the string-bending sounds on the sitar and did my best to replicate them. I’ve never studied Indian music but appreciated it from afar, and this pointed a lot of us kids to the real stuff. Just as a piece of music, it’s a beautiful melody that we still quote to this day.” REEVES GABRELS: “[This song] opened the ears — and minds — of Beatles fans and expanded the palette for the band’s contemporaries for years to come. Harrison fully incorporated the sitar and tambura into this composition and stretched the Western 12-tone system with slurs and embellishments. And he did so without the other Beatles, who don’t play on the track.”

STEVE MORSE: “‘Within You Without You’ is a great example of George leading the band into a mystical, heavy place. I’d say that this song, more than any other at the time, brought the most of George’s personality to the band’s direction. And by featuring studio musicians from India, it was one of the first fusion tunes I’d ever heard.”