The Concert for Bangladesh

On 1 August 1971 two concerts were given one after the other at Madison Square Garden in New York. The aim was to raise relief for refugees fleeing East Pakistan. George Harrison and Ravi Shankar organised them, and Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston and Leon Russell took the stage. The film is made from the recording of those two shows. The concert is remembered as the first large instance of major musicians coming together for a humanitarian crisis, and it opened the way for every benefit concert that followed. The opening set played by Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan was the first time a Western rock audience heard Indian music on that scale. What sits behind it is heavy: millions of people fleeing the massacres of the Bangladesh Liberation War.