Sitar player Ravi Shankar rose to popularity in the mid-1950s when he toured internationally and became the most influential and famous Indian classical musician in the world. His collaborations with bands like The Beatles made headlines in the West, bringing a distinctly Indian sound to modern music. He is perhaps best known today among younger audiences as the father of singer-songwriter Norah Jones. The year this poster was printed, Shankar won his first Grammy Award for the chamber music record East Meets West, recorded in collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin. The previous June, he had given his first major American performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, a legendary three-day concert featuring some of the earliest major public appearances by The Who and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. That concert and its filmed documentary by D.A. Pennebaker reinforced Shankar’s popularity in the American counterculture scene. After performing at Woodstock in 1969, however, he would distance himself from hippie culture due to its frequent association with marijuana and other drugs; for him, music was a religious expression that should not be tainted by mind-altering substances. Kieser’s design for Shankar’s West German tour draws on the popular psychedelic style of American counterculture as well as Indian architectural motifs. The frame surrounding the musician’s portrait and an oversize sitar echoes the forms of classical Mughal archways while the colorful swirls surrounding him may reference Milton Glaser’s famous portrait of Bob Dylan, released with that artist’s Greatest Hits album in 1967.