RAVI SHANKAR:Ravi Shankar was a sitarist and composer from India whose collaborations with western classical musicians as well as the Beatles and other rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of his country's traditional music.
Shankar, who died last Tuesday in a hospital near his home in San Diego aged 92, was a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose virtuosity transcended musical languages.
He collaborated with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and was a mentor to the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. But western interest in his instrument, the sitar, exploded in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles encountered one on the set of Help!
Harrison was intrigued by the instrument, with its small rounded body, long neck and resonating gourd. It has six melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings, which are not played but resonate freely as the others are plucked.
He soon learned its rudiments and used it that year on a Beatles recording, Norwegian Wood. The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups quickly followed suit, although few went as far as Harrison, who recorded several songs on Beatles albums with Indian musicians rather than with his band mates. By the summer of 1967, the sitar was in vogue in the rock world.
At first Shankar revelled in the attention his connection with popular culture brought him, and he performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969.
In addition to his frequent tours as a sitarist, Shankar, the father of the singer Norah Jones and the sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, was a prolific composer of film music (including the score for Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi in 1982), ballets, electronic works and concertos for sitar and western orchestras.
Palace of Culture
In 1988, his seven-movement Swar Milan was performed at the Palace of Culture in Moscow by an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble, members of the Moscow Philharmonic and the Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Shankar’s own group of Indian musicians. And, in 1990, he collaborated with minimalist composer Philip Glass on Passages, a recording of works he and Glass composed for each other.
“I have always had an instinct for doing new things,” Shankar said in 1985. While excited by the hippy movement, he was disturbed by the use of drugs with the music.
Ravi Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7th, 1920, in Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His older brother Uday directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10. Within five years he had become a star soloist. He discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod.
The idea of helping western listeners appreciate the intricacies of Indian music occurred to him during his years as a dancer. In 1936, an Indian court musician, Allaudin Khan, joined the company for a year and set Shankar on a different path. “He was the first person frank enough to tell me that I had talent but that I was wasting it – that I was going nowhere, doing nothing,” Shankar said. “Everyone else was full of praise, but he killed my ego and made me humble.”
When Shankar asked Khan to teach him, he was told that he could learn to play the sitar only after he decided to give up the worldly life he was leading and devote himself fully to his studies. In 1937, Shankar gave up dancing, sold his western clothes and returned to India to become a musician.
Performing career
After studying with Khan for seven years and marrying his daughter, Annapurna, also a sitarist, Shankar began his performing career.
He became increasingly interested in touring outside India in the early 1950s. His appetite was whetted further when he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was invited to perform in London and New York. But it wasn’t until 1956 that he began spending long periods outside India. That year, he left his position at All India Radio and undertook tours of Europe and the US.
In 1952, he met and began performing with Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI.John Coltrane had become fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in the early 1960s and met Shankar several times from 1964 to 1966 to learn the basics of ragas, talas and Indian improvisation techniques. Coltrane named his son Ravi Coltrane, also a saxophonist, after Shankar.
Shankar maintained his friendship with George Harrison. They last worked together in 1997, when Harrison produced Shankar’s Chants of India CD for EMI.
Shankar was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, from 1986 to 1992.
He taught extensively in the US. In 2010, the Ravi Shankar Foundation started a record label.
Shankar’s first marriage, to Annapurna Devi, ended in the late 1960s. They had a son, Shubhendra Shankar, who died in 1992. He also had long relationships with Kamala Shastri, a dancer; Sue Jones, a concert producer, with whom he had a daughter, Norah Jones, in 1979; as well as Sukanya Rajan, whom he married in 1989. Anoushka Shankar, the sitar virtuoso, is their daughter, born in 1981.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters, as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.