Pandit Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar

Just to add on his Guru

Baba Allauddin Khan (1862–1972), was an Indian classical sarodiya and multi-instrumentalist and one of the greatest music teachers of the 20th Century, father of Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi and guru to Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee, Vasant Rai, Pannalal Ghosh and other influential musicians

WOW! His guru lived for a 110 years? (1862-1972)

'I thought all the acrimony was over. Now, I find, it is back again!'

But the written down media is today the most ephemeral? Today's written down banner headline is in tomorrow's dustbin.

That may happen in music also. Instruments will change. Electronic instruments may take over from strings. But the content of the music will remain because that is absolutely fixed. In our music, things will also change. We are not singing Vedic hymns any more. We are not singing Chhanda Prabandha or Sanskrit songs or Vidyarthi Sangit. But the changes here are so slow that only the radical and tremendously talented people like Mian Tansen survive. Tansen was so badly criticised during his own time. It is only towards the end that he got the recognition he deserved.

Baba Allaudin Khan is another example. He too belonged to that elite band of extremely talented people who brought out new things within the framework of our tradition. All these people were very badly criticised. Later, people realised their contribution. They were then accepted and people forgot all about the past criticism. The only difference is: Today the changes are very fast. Satyanash ho gaya. Too much commercialisation. These are the usual charges.

But you faced these charges years ago? Charges of commercialisation, going to the West, sleeping with pop....

Over the past ten years or so, all these had quietened down. The critics were starting to even acknowledge and appreciate my experimental compositions which had, earlier, gone over their heads. I thought all the acrimony was over. Now, I find, it is back again!

Is that the fundamental difference between you and your contemporaries like Vilayat Khan and Nikhil Banerjee? That you took risks with your music? That you explored new frontiers, did more radical experiments, attracted more ire?

The difference between all of them and me is actually a very simple one. It is my double identity. When I play the sitar in the traditional gharana learned at the feet of Baba, I am very orthodox. On the other hand, when I compose original music, I am daring, radical. I use non-Indian instruments. I experiment. People often confuse these two identities of mine. They think because I am experimenting, I am no more pure, I am gone.

I do the same thing even in my programmes. If you hear me in the first part, when I begin, you will find me an absolute purist. But in the end, like Fayyaz Khan, who used to sing ghazals and thumris after the dhrupads, I also play a few popular numbers. In fact even Baba did that. He played kirtans and bauls. That was his greatness, his playfulness. The fact that he did not trap himself in his self-image.

Do you think that in the era of Indipop and filmi geet, of MTV and Channel [V], the Indian public retains enough stamina for enjoying pure classical music?

Non-classical music is getting so much exposure these days that, you are right, I sometimes wonder. Film music, fusion, hard rock, remixes. I am not sure it is all that good for all those people who live in the villages and the small towns of India. It may be fine for the big city people. They are like anyone anywhere else in the world. They get everything in real time. But the rest of India is confused by this huge invasion. Particularly the visual aspect of this kind of music. I find it, frankly, terrible. The pictures more than the music.

But the difference between classical and pop music is slowly getting blurred as the Pavarottis of the world span both universes? He sells as much as any pop star and attracts as huge an audience, if not more, than Madonna? How do you explain this?

I don't. But the critics are up in arms when Pavarotti sings arias chewing gum. They see it as an insult to opera. At least you cannot accuse me of doing something like that. I am far more conservative, whatever my critics may say.

Is music moving away from music-to-be-heard to music-to-be-seen? Do you think every musician will eventually end up being a performer if he or she wants to be heard?

I agree with you. With all these TV channels that is exactly what is happening. People want to see music. Not just listen to it. You are right. The nature of music is changing. I am also guilty. Thanks to my brother Uday Shankar, from the very beginning I was very particular about the look of the performance. The lighting; the stage; the dress; the dcor; the atmosphere I created. I always believe that is very important for the audience to fully appreciate the quality of my music. It is no use having a great performance where everything looks tacky, where performers spit wyak thoo into a spittoon while performing onstage or boast about their khandaani lineage. In fact, I hate this I-am-the-Greatest syndrome. Or pulling down other artists.

Frankly, Pritish, this Ravi Shankar phobia has been always there. It is not something new. It is not unexpected. But, quite honestly, I did not expect it to reach such a level where they are ready to denigrate the highest award in the land just to pull me down!

Photographs: Jewella Miranda

The Shankars in Their Prime

Old recordings by Ravi Shankar and a new one by Anoushka Shankar
TEED ROCKWELL, Mar 07, 2006

Ravi Shankar. THE ESSENTIAL RAVI SHANKAR. Columbia/Private Music.
Anoushka Shankar. RISE. EMI classics.

Ravi Shankar grew up as a living representative of Indian culture to thousands of people throughout America and Europe. But his relationship to Indian culture was paradoxically both close and distant. He was familiar with some of the finest aspects of Indian music and dance, but they were filtered through the unique genius of his brother Uday Shankar. Uday had been a painter living in Europe when the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova asked him to help her choreograph a piece called "Oriental Impressions." The success of this project inspired Uday to study dance traditions from all over India, from which he fashioned a highly original new style that was still unquestionably Indian. Ravi started traveling with Uday's troupe when he was 10, and for many Europeans, this troupe was their first direct contact with Indian culture. But Ravi himself spent his formative years mainly in Paris and London, and during that time had more direct exposure to Europe than India. Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Toscanini, and Gertrude Stein were household guests, he heard concerts by Andre Segovia and Cab Calloway, and a beautiful Hollywood star once offered to adopt him. Nevertheless, his indirect exposure to Indian culture defined him as a person, and he knew that he had a special responsibility to be authentically Indian. Perhaps this was why he had to return to India, and immerse himself in Hindustani music in the traditional guru-shishya relationship.

Ravi Shankar's daughter Anoushka was similarly suspended between cultures. She grew up first in London, then moved to California, acquiring a new accent for each location. But she also learned to speak Tamil to her mother, Bengali to her father, and Hindi to their friends. She studied sitar with her father but also became accomplished at European classical piano. She is now almost the same age at which Ravi Shankar achieved international recognition as a musician, and has released her first fusion album, Rise, which has been nominated for a Grammy. There is also a re-release of Ravi Shankar's earlier music in a double CD called the Essential Ravi Shankar. One CD consists entirely of classical Hindustani performances, the other is selections from different fusion albums.

In old photographs of the young Ravi and recent photographs of Anoushka, they seem like brother and sister, or even twins. But what is even more striking is how much their sitar playing sounds alike. These recordings of the young Ravi, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, have the flash, sparkle, and flair of Anoushka's current playing. He was clearly inspired by the virtuoso rock guitarists of the time, as they were famously inspired by him. None of these recordings show the full development of a raga that Ravi Shankar would have presented during a strictly classical concert. Instead, the compilers of this CD choose recordings where Ravi Shankar expands light formats and compresses serious ones to get the maximum amount of expression from each minute. A light dadra begins with virtuoso leaps and sequences, and ends with dazzlingly fast scales. A performance of Desh in slow Teental compresses every essential nuance of the raga into 15 minutes, including a short alap. There are still some techniques on this recording that Anoushka has not fully mastered (yet), such as the surbahar-inspired bends in the lower register. But she has already captured so much of the sound and feel of the youthful Ravi Shankar that mastering the rest seems inevitable.

The music on the second CD was created before terms like "fusion" or "world music" existed, and thus seems astonishingly prophetic today. This CD opens with a selection from the famed 1967 East Meets West collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin, and continues with selections from the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, which gradually show more mastery of various Western idioms. The selection from East Meets West is actually the sort of fixed composition used as a teaching exercise by classical Hindustani musicians, but which is never performed in concert. Recognizing that these fixed compositions really are beautiful enough to be performed, and that they were a perfect vehicle for Menuhin's virtuoso reading abilities, was a masterful reframing of traditional material. Other selections come from Tana Mana, which features Ravi Shankar playing keyboard synthesizers supported by orchestrations of acoustic Indian instruments; Live at the Kremlin, featuring Russian symphonic and folk performers; and Passages, a collaboration with minimalist composer Phillip Glass. For these albums, Ravi Shankar skillfully created orchestrations for large ensembles, but deliberately limited himself to the modal and monophonic materials of Hindustani music. This worked especially well in his collaboration with Glass, who had been independently going in that direction from the symphonic tradition, and was thus in effect able to meet Ravi Shankar half way.

............................................................ ..................

Rise, Anoushka's first fusion album, shows a similar adventurousness, but with a more improvisatory feel. She had originally intended to take a year off from touring and performing, but discovered that she relaxed best by playing in a recording studio. She kept inviting friends to play with her, such as Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, pianist Pedro Ricardo Mino, and tabla players Bikram Ghosh and Tanmoy Bose. There was some sheet music used, but the main creative process was playing together and multi-tracking until organic interaction evolved into fully realized composition. Her break from Hindustani music did not mean that she was neglecting it. On the contrary, there are tracks here that contain the best alaps I have ever heard her perform, which are actually enhanced by the electronic keyboards and signal processing. Just as Ravi Shankar learned how to adapt Western sheet music and arrangements to his Hindustani roots, so also Anoushka has learned to adapt the technology of the 21st century recording studio to her father's gharana. She is clearly carrying on the family tradition of adaptation and creativity.

Teed Rockwell has studied Indian classical music with Ali Akbar Khan and other great Indian musicians. He is the first person to play Hindustani music on the Touchstyle Fretboard.