Folks endless bicker about what player ripped off another player and what singer actually first sang what song. The answers to those things matter – they might be more interesting than important, though. Either way, Elvis isn’t an awful charlatan. Just like Charlie Parker isn’t, just like Bob Dylan isn’t. Did each of those performers use other people’s music. Yup. Did the results wind up impacting entire generations? Yup. So, what’s the difference.

Popol Vuh’s Yoga seems to be a story about the theft of music as well. But it has nothing to do with cultural appropriation, just the theft of a physical object. Granted when a troupe of unnamed Indian classical musicians entered Florian Fricke’s studio during the seventies, the rest of Popul Vuh was absent. So, the release of these sessions during which Fricke plays organ every once in a while under his band’s name is a bit bizarre – and has been figured as such by Fricke himself. But the album’s out there and the music’s a decent example of Eastern stuffs recorded in the West. There’s nothing mind blowing, but nothing to let a listener down.

That said, Fricke never had any intention of releasing the tapes. Someone simply grabbed ‘em, split and issued the recordings a few years on. Those forgotten Indian musicians most likely don’t even know that this has occurred or there would have been some sort of action to wrangle the rights or something to that affect.

Either way, this sort of thing apparently winds up occurring on a relatively frequent basis. There are those tapes with Hendrix playing with John McLaughlin and neither of those guys intended to have those tapes issued – not that Hendrix had too much of a say in the matter. But a few decades on, during the nineties, the same thing happened again with tapes David Grisman and Jerry Garcia recorded.

Eventually issued as The Pizza Tapes – the recordings were allegedly snagged by a delivery guy – those sessions with Grisman and Garcia evoke a century’s worth of American music through covers, an occasional Dead song and the camaraderie of a pair of players not found too commonly.

In each of these cases – Hendrix/McLaughlin, Fricke and Grisman/Garcia – it seems that the world was enriched, at least a bit, by the casual theft and defiance only dullards might display. How unfair was all of this? Pretty unfair. But all those tunes were pretty decent to hear.