Raga is a melodic concept almost completely unknown in our culture. A raga is a blueprint for composing and improvising melody. The best way that I know how to describe what a raga is to Western musicians is to equate it to the “blues”. To learn to play or sing the blues, a musician or singer not only learns a scale, because there is much more to singing or playing the blues. For example, there are the blues form, a twelve-bar repeating pattern of chords, embellishment notes, and riffs. One learns blues by listening to great blues recordings. The same is true for learning ragas. Learning a single raga is like learning the blues. But once you know that raga, like knowing the various possibilities of the blues, you will be able to sing or play it, and you will reconize it when singers and musicians from India are performing it. (Don Robertson)