There was no World Music Festival
No event with the name “World Music Festival” took place in 1967. The phrase “world music” did not exist as a commercial category at that time; it came into use in later decades as a marketing label for recordings from outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream. What did happen in 1967 was a series of separate occasions on which music from outside the United States and Britain reached large audiences. Three stand out: Ravi Shankar’s performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, Hugh Masekela’s set at the same festival, and the World Festival of performing arts that ran alongside Expo 67 in Montreal.
Ravi Shankar at Monterey
Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist, played on the afternoon of Sunday, 18 June 1967, at Monterey. Shankar was already an established musician in India and had performed in Europe and the United States for years. His 1967 audience was different, however. By then George Harrison had studied sitar with him, and Harrison’s use of the instrument on the Beatles’ recordings had made Indian sounds familiar to a rock audience. The Sgt. Pepper album, released a couple of weeks before the festival, included a Harrison song built around Indian instruments.
At Monterey, Shankar was accompanied by the tabla player Alla Rakha. The performance was a long, formal Indian classical raga, and it was given its own slot, not tucked in as a novelty between rock acts. Observers have often described the audience as attentive and appreciative, and the film footage of the set is widely praised. Some caution is needed, as retellings of the afternoon tend to be romantic, and not every listener at the fairgrounds was necessarily rapt. What is clear is that the festival’s organisers chose to feature him prominently, and that the spot was treated as an important part of the programme.
Shankar himself had mixed feelings about the rock audience. He is generally reported to have been uncomfortable with the way some young listeners treated Indian music as part of a drug-influenced scene, and he later made his reservations known. That tension is worth remembering, since the enthusiasm of the late 1960s for Indian music sometimes ran ahead of understanding. A related strand of the same interest was the overland hippie route to India, as young Westerners travelled to find teachers and landscapes they had read about.
Hugh Masekela at Monterey
Hugh Masekela, the South African trumpeter and composer, performed on the Saturday evening bill. He had left South Africa in 1960, in the years of the apartheid government’s crackdown, and was living in the United States, where he built a career in jazz and popular music. His appearance at Monterey was one of the few moments at the festival when an African musician stood in the foreground of a bill otherwise dominated by American and British acts.
It is important not to overstate what is known. Detailed set lists and the specific effect on the crowd are not well documented in standard accounts. His success with a wider American pop audience is usually associated with 1968, which falls outside this story. The honest summary is that Masekela’s presence showed the festival’s organisers were willing to book jazz-based and African music alongside rock, and that his appearance is part of the record of the weekend.
The World Festival at Expo 67
The third strand lies outside California. Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal, ran from 27 April to 29 October 1967 and marked Canada’s centennial. Besides pavilions and exhibitions, it included a programme of performing arts, often referred to as the World Festival. It brought companies and musicians from many countries to Montreal, covering orchestra, opera, ballet, theatre and folk traditions.
This was a very different kind of event from Monterey. It was organised under official sponsorship, by governments and cultural agencies, in a formal setting, and its audience included a vast number of visitors drawn by the fair itself. The festival belongs to a longer tradition of international cultural exchange, in which countries sent performers abroad as a way to present themselves. A full list of the companies that appeared is easy to get wrong from memory, so none is named here beyond the general character of the programme.
What these events had in common
The three occasions had little organisational connection. They shared a backdrop, though: air travel and recording had made it much easier for music to cross borders, and audiences in 1967 were more curious about what lay beyond their own country’s pop charts. The differences matter too. Shankar’s audience encountered his music largely through the lens of the counterculture, Masekela’s through jazz and exile, and the Montreal festival’s through national pride and diplomacy.
Labelling any of this “world music” in 1967 would be anachronistic. It is more accurate to say that 1967 offered a number of meetings between musical traditions, some commercial, some official and some accidental, and that the later category grew out of that kind of exchange.