The Three Portraits of Krishna were composed in 1986 at a time when D'Angelo was renewing himself as a composer through the study of classical Indian music. In the late 1980's he wrote (and improvised at the piano) several pieces of music in which the entire fabric of a movement was based solely on a given North Indian scale of tones that form the basis of what is called 'raga'. The Hindu deity Krishna, himself a powerful incarnation of the deity Vishnu, has long been associated not only with th...