Magic Carpet

In the early 1970s the ensemble Magic Carpet issued only a single recording, its self-titled debut, which merged Indian ragas with singer-songwriter folk in a style that called to mind Joni Mitchell joined by the Incredible String Band. Sitarist Clem Alford, guitarist Jim Moyes and tabla player Keshav Sathe had already released an earlier LP on Windmill under the name Sagram, a misspelling of their intended Sargam. The Mushroom label in Britain offered the trio studio time on the condition that they recruit a vocalist, prompting Moyes to enlist Alisha Sufit, an acquaintance from the Chelsea School of Art.

On the resulting album Sufit, credited simply as Alisha, supplied the majority of the vocals through her relaxed original material, which displayed a pronounced songwriting and vocal kinship with the earliest work of Joni Mitchell and more remote traces of British folk contemporaries such as Sandy Denny. Alford (sitar, esraj, tamboura), Moyes (electric guitar) and Sathe (tabla, percussion) supplied the accompaniment and pursued more elaborate Indian ragas on the instrumentals. Limited to a pressing of one thousand copies, the LP became a scarce collector’s item and received a CD reissue in the 1990s. Magic Carpet played a handful of concerts and radio sessions before dissolving less than a year later.

In 1996 Sufit and Alford, joined by two musicians absent from the original lineup, issued a stylistically comparable album under the name Magic Carpet II titled Once Moor. Sufit and Alford have each also released solo recordings.