Crossover legacy

Ravi Shankar, left, and his daughter Anoushka Shankar. (Joseph Barrak/AFP/Getty)

Writing about Ravi Shankar, it’s hard to avoid superlatives: “living legend,” “sitar giant,” “the godfather of world music,” who, with a little help from his friend, Beatle George Harrison, introduced the keening beauty of Indian classical music to millions of pop-bred Western ears. He’s also one of the first great crossover artists. In short, Shankar is a pioneer, as I needlessly reminded him during a recent interview in advance of his Oct. 23 concert at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall.

“That’s what everybody says,” Shankar replies, unleashing one of his melodious laughs via a hotel telephone in Baltimore. “I don’t know. I’ve been given all these titles: ‘the godfather,’ ‘ambassador’ and all that. They’ve been given lovingly, but to me, I’m still a student.”

Humble words from the 87-year-old maestro, whose career has been as multifaceted as it has been long. There is Shankar the unlikely rock star, playing at hippie milestones like the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock, as well as inspiring (and opening) Harrison’s historic Concert for Bangladesh. There is Shankar the collaborator, teaming with the likes of classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin and avant-garde composer Philip Glass and penning scores for the film masterpieces of Satyajit Ray and the Oscar-winning Gandhi (1983). Then there is Shankar the virtuoso, whose mesmerizing sitar recitals with his trusty tabla (hand-drum) player, the late Alla Rakha, at the height of their powers, ranked among the great transcendent musical experiences.

And today, there is Shankar the proud father of two very talented, if musically divergent, daughters.

“As you know, I’m blessed twice,” Shankar says cheerfully, referring both to his youngest daughter and sitar disciple, Anoushka Shankar, and his older daughter, Geethali, better known as multi-Grammy-winning pop singer Norah Jones. Anoushka, 26, will be performing with Shankar when they play Toronto. The gig was originally scheduled for last fall, but postponed when the elderly pandit came down with double pneumonia.

“He’s definitely recovered to an incredible degree,” Anoushka assured me in a separate interview. “We still need to be aware of his health and careful with him more than before. But he’s done a couple of tours already since then, which is crazy,” she adds with a giggle.

In recent years, Anoushka and her father have toured as a double act, with the younger musician handling the bulk of the sitar playing. In their current series of concerts, she performs during the first half with bansuri flutist Ravichandra Kulur and tabla player Tanmoy Bose, while Shankar plays in the second part and joins Anoushka in a sitar duet.

Shankar says he never imagined he’d one day be performing alongside his daughter. “But I’m so grateful; she’s the best student I’ve ever had. When I play with her, it feels like an extension of me.” Anoushka was eight years old when she began studying with him in New Delhi.

Beatles guitarist George Harrison, left, studied the sitar under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar. (Michael Ochs archives/Getty)

At first, Ravi was hesitant to teach his little girl the demanding, 18-stringed instrument. “That was the Western influence in me,” he says, “not to force her to do anything, to let her blossom out in whatever she did best. But her mother [Shankar’s second and current wife, Sukanya] told me to put her to sitar. She was already very talented – she was playing piano and singing – and so I started teaching her, and I found her to be so fantastic in picking up things.”

Like his own guru, Baba Allaudin Khan, Shankar could be a taskmaster, but Anoushka says he was easier on her than he was with his other students.

“I still got the same expectations and the same requirements, but he wouldn’t fly off the handle with me quite so much. He was a little softer and peppered his lessons with stories, to make it amenable to a child.”

At 13, Anoushka chose to devote herself entirely to classical sitar. “At times I struggled with the weight of taking on a musical tradition such as this,” she confesses. “It’s kind of a huge thing; you can’t do it lightly, you can’t do it half-way, especially in my position as his daughter. I wasn’t forced to do it, but if I’m going to do it, I’d better really do it.”

By her late teens, Anoushka was already establishing herself as a fitting heir to her father. She was encouraged by such family friends as the late Harrison, her “Uncle George,” who supervised her first recording, a piece on the 1995 In Celebration album that Harrison produced in honour of Shankar’s 75th birthday.

She later paid tribute to Harrison at the 2002 memorial Concert for George, performing a lovely version of one of his Beatles sitar tunes, The Inner Light. (Harrison famously took sitar lessons from the elder Shankar in the 1960s, but was unable to keep it up due to his commitments with the Beatles. “He would have been a wonderful sitar player, I can assure you,” Ravi says. “He had all the talent and all the love, but his schedule was so busy.”)

Like her dad, Anoushka has divided her career between playing classical Indian ragas and composing new work in collaboration with artists from other musical genres. However, she’s taken his crossover experiments much further in her solo albums, melding traditional Indian sounds with folk, jazz, flamenco, electronica and other styles.

“The world is more ready for that today,” Anoushka says. “When my father came out, there was nothing like that. As far as mixing styles, that’s almost incidental to me. Whether, as a composer, I’m making purely Indian music or hip hop or anything, [what’s important is] the ability to be creatively free, to go wherever that takes you.”

(EMI Music Canada)

Her fifth and latest album, Breathing Under Water, released this past summer, is her most eclectic excursion so far. A joint venture with Indo-American musician-producer Karsh Kale, its tracks stray into pop-ballad and dance-club territory and boast high-profile guest artists like Sting and Norah Jones. Jones’s vocals on an ethereal, sitar-laced number called Easy mark the first time Anoushka has formally collaborated with her older half-sister, the child of Shankar’s relationship with American concert promoter Sue Jones.

“We’ve messed around together in private before, but this is the first time we’ve actually worked together on a record,” Anoushka says, adding that she and Norah “are very close.”

Anoushka is also pals with Sting, having played on his Sacred Love album. She and Kale wrote the song Sea Dreamer with him in mind. “It was an instrumental piece we were working on,” she says, “but when we were talking about the mood that we were trying to convey, he came up – his way of singing and his type of love songs. When he showed some initial interest, we really stretched ourselves to write lyrics for Sting, which is no small task,” she laughs.

As a kind of seal of parental approval, her father also appears on the album, on the two-part Oceanic. “Having him on a record that makes all these stylistic journeys lends it some weight,” Anoushka says. “In a way, he represents the source of all that. He was the first person to cross over.”

Looking back, Ravi likes to joke about those early days as a music ambassador in the 1950s and 60s, when clueless Western audiences would applaud enthusiastically after he simply tuned his sitar.

“When I started, it was terrible in the sense that they really did not know anything about Indian music,” he says. “Now it has become so much different. There are more people who appreciate and even understand our music.”

Ravi and Anoushka Shankar perform in Toronto on Oct. 23.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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