Best Known As: The sitar virtuoso who influenced The Beatles
Ravi Shankar is the 20th century's most famous player of the complex stringed instrument known as the sitar. The 1950s were possibly Shankar's most creative period: he composed and performed, worked as musical director of All-India Radio in Delhi, created the Vadya Vrinda Chamber Orchestra, scored films (most notably the Apu Trilogy of director Satyajit Ray) and began touring the world and winning acclaim for himself and for Indian music. In the 1960s Shankar grew still more famous for his influence on The Beatles, who used a sitar in some of their more psychedelic tunes. (Shankar was particular friends with George Harrison, who produced some of Shankar's later albums.) As years passed Shankar became known less as a performer and more as an elder statesman of world music. In 2000 he was given the French Legion of Honor, and in 2001 he was awarded an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II.
Shankar's daughter Anoushka Shankar also is a popular sitarist... Shankar is the father of vocalist Norah Jones... Like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, Shankar played at Woodstock.
(born April 7, 1920, Benares, India) Indian sitar player. He studied music and dance, toured as a member of his brother Uday's dance troupe, and spent years learning the sitar. After serving as music director of All-India Radio (1948 – 56), he began a series of European and U.S. tours. He wrote the score for Satyajit Ray's Apu film trilogy (1955 – 59). He was a founder of the National Orchestra of India, and in 1962 he founded the Kinnara School of Music in Bombay (now Mumbai) and later in Los Angeles. His performances with Yehudi Menuhin and his association with George Harrison of the Beatles were primarily responsible for bringing Indian music to a broad Western audience.
(b Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 7 April 1920). Indian sitar player and composer. By the mid-1940s he had embarked on a performing career in India. He toured Europe and the USA (1956-7) and laid the foundations of an international reputation that has greatly furthered the popularity of Indian music in the West.
Perhaps the best known Indian musician, sitar player and composer Ravi Shankar (born 1920) is credited more than any other individual with introducing Indian musical traditions to the West and expanding those traditions to incorporate Western classical, popular music, and minimalist musical forms.
Already an established musician and composer in his homeland during the 1940s, Shankar gained international attention in the 1950s with his collaborations with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and, in the 1960s and 1970s, with his featured performances at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. His friendship with guitarist, songwriter, and producer George Harrison of the Beatles, which began in 1966, resulted in the introduction of traditional Indian instrumentation on several Beatles recordings. Harrison repaid the favor by lending his guitar playing and production to Shankar's albums Shankar Family & Friends and Festival of India. These recordings and his close association with the Beatles raised the Western youth culture's interest in Indian music. Shankar is also credited with influencing the jazz recordings of John and Alice Coltrane and the minimalist compositions of Phillip Glass, with whom Shankar collaborated on Passages. He has also composed music for flautist Jean Pierre Rampal, Japanese musician Hosan Yamamoto, and jazz musicians Bud Schank, John Handy, and Buddy Rich.
Early Years in Bengal and Paris
Born Robindra Shankar in West Bengal on April 7, 1920, Shankar was the youngest of four sons who survived childhood born to the Brahmin family of Pandit Shyam Shankar, a Sanskrit, Vedic, and philosophy scholar. The elder Shankar also served as a diwan, or legal minister serving the Maharaja (king) of Jhalawar in Rajasthan. The close relationship of Shankar's mother with the Maharani (queen) granted him access to private royal musical events, which exposed him to many of India's most famous performers of the day.
By the time he was ten, Shankar's older brother, Uday Shankar, established himself as a professional dancer in Europe with Anna Pavlova. After forming his own Indian dance company in Paris, Uday invited his mother and brothers to join him in 1930. The troupe toured throughout Europe, introducing the Shankars to European culture. Ravi Shankar became an accomplished dancer and contemplated making dance his profession. When virtuoso Indian musician Ustad Allauddin Khan joined the troupe for one year in 1935, however, Shankar's interest in becoming a musician was renewed.
Khan, called "Baba" by Shankar, began giving him sitar and voice lessons but became annoyed that the lessons seemed secondary to dancing. "Sometimes, he would become upset and grow angry when I was learning, because, although I was a good student, he felt that dance was uppermost in my thoughts," Shankar later noted. "It angered and hurt him that I should be 'wasting my musical talent' and living in glitter and luxury. Baba insisted that this was no way to learn music from him, not in these surroundings, and he swore I would never go through the discipline and master the technique of the sitar."
Shankar quit dancing in 1938 and returned to India to finish his Brahmin initiation, determined to master the sitar. After spending two months abstaining from worldly comforts and eating specially prepared foods, he traveled to Maihar in central India to seek more lessons from Khan. Khan conducted his school like an ashram, requiring his pupils to approach their instrument as a spiritual exercise and to honor him as their guru. Khan and Shankar became very close during the seven years that Shankar studied in Maihar. Shankar married Khan's daughter, Annapurna, in 1941, and they had a son, Shubho, in 1942. Khan's son, Ali Akbar Khan, became a world-renowned musician and a frequent collaborator and touring partner with Shankar.
National and International Fame
After completing his training with Khan, Shankar moved to Bombay, where he joined the Indian People's Theatre Association. He composed the music for the ballet India Immortal in 1945, and, in 1946, soundtrack music for the films Dharti Ke Lal and Neecha Nagar and wrote new music for India's national song "Sara Jahan Se Accha." In 1947, he celebrated India's independence by adapting the works of Nehru for the ballet Discovery of India.
In 1949, Shankar moved to Delhi to accept the director of music post at All-India Radio. He organized and composed music for Vadya Vrinda, the National Orchestra, which is credited with expanding the possibilities of Indian orchestral music. He also composed film scores for Satyajit Ray's acclaimed Apu trilogy.
In 1954, Shankar toured the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the first Indian Cultural Delegation. He conducted a solo tour of Europe and America in 1956. After releasing two acclaimed albums, Ravi Shankar Plays Three Classical Ragas and India's Master Musician, in 1957, he toured Japan as leader of a cultural delegation and played at the UNESCO Music Festival in Paris in 1958.
Influenced Western Music
Recognition for Shankar's music increased in the 1960s, and he began seeking ways to integrate Indian music with Western musical forms. In 1962, he released the jazz-influenced album Improvisations with Bud Shank. He also instructed horn player Don Ellis and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane in Indian music, leading to Coltrane's modal experimentation on several groundbreaking jazz albums of the 1960s. Shankar also contributed his composition Rich a la Rakha to jazz drummer Buddy Rich and tabla player Alla Rakha.
In 1966, Shankar met and became friends with George Harrison, the guitarist of the Beatles. Harrison's interest in Eastern religions had led him to Indian music. Harrison, in turn, introduced the band's producer, George Martin, and the other Beatles to Indian music. The Beatles first employed a sitar accompaniment on the song "Norwegian Wood." Soon, other rock groups such as the Butterfield Blues Band and the Byrds were displaying Indian influences. Shankar's appearances at both the Monterey Pop and Woodstock festivals increased his popularity among Western youth. But Woodstock's audience mistakenly applauded him for tuning his instrument, and, with the exception of the Concert for Bangladesh, Shankar refused to perform at other pop music festivals. "After I went to Woodstock and one or two others, I thought may be I should not go anymore," he noted, adding, "It sort of hurts me to see people all stoned and doing silly things, things I couldn't imagine. And our music needs a bit of respect like any serious music - Bach, Mozart - so when I found that it was not possible, I thought it was better to keep away."
In 1971, Shankar won a Grammy Award for Best Album for the Concert for Bangladesh soundtrack, the same year he debuted his Concerto for Sitar with the London Symphony Orchestra, featuring Andre Previn and Shankar as soloists. In 1981, he performed a similar feat with conductor Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1974, Shankar toured the United States with Harrison. Ben Fong Torres reviewed a Seattle performance of Shankar's "Dispute and Violence:" "A sometimes loose, sometimes tight fusion of various forms of Eastern and Western music - folk, classical and spiritual Indian; rock, jazz and even big-band swing. … Shankar at the podium, arms flailing, index fingers dipping and pointing, took it all to a victorious, symphonic, last-stomp halt."
Harrison produced two of Shankar's albums in the first half of the 1970s and described his friend as "the godfather of world music." In 1978, Shankar collaborated with Japanese shakahachi player Hozan Yamamoto and koko player Susumii Miyashita on the album East Greets East. In 1982, he was named Artistic Director of the Asian Olympics held in Delhi and was nominated with George Fenton for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for the Richard Attenborough film Gandhi. He also served a six-year term from 1986 to 1992 in India's parliamentary upper chamber, the Rajya Sabha. His past experience as a dancer benefited him when he performed at the Kremlin in Moscow in the late 1980s, employing Bolshoi dancers alongside traditional Indian and contemporary electronic instrumentation. The recording of this performance, Ravi Shankar inside the Kremlin, is considered to be one of his best releases.
In 1989, he toured Europe and India with Zubin Mehta and the European Youth Orchestra. Shankar also composed and performed in a musical theater piece, Ghanashyam, in Britain in 1989 and India in 1991, and collaborated with Phillip Glass on Passages in 1990. Even into the new millenium, he continued to write, perform, and tour.
Books
Fong-Torres, Ben, editor, What's That Sound?, Rolling Stone Press, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.
Shankar, Ravi, 1920-, Indian sitarist and composer, b. Varanasi. He was the first Indian instrumentalist to attain an international reputation. As a youth Shankar was a noted solo dancer with his brother Uday's Indian dance troupe in Paris. In 1938 he became a pupil of the great Indian instrumentalist Ustad Allauddin Khan, whose daughter, Annapurna, he later married. Proficient on many instruments, Shankar became a virtuoso of the sitar, and in 1957 he made the first of several concert tours of the United States. In 1962 he founded the Kinnara School of Music in Bombay (now Mumbai). For a few months in 1965, George Harrison of the Beatles studied sitar with Shankar, and Beatles recordings began featuring Harrison playing the instrument. Other rock groups followed suit, and for a time the sound of the sitar was a staple of rock music. As the foremost interpreter of the instrument, Shankar was catapulted to fame. His 1967 concert tour of the United States was an overwhelming success, and he was invited to hold classes at various American colleges and universities.
Since the 1980s Shankar has explored the possibilities of merging Indian music with electronic synthesizer and emulator technology. He also has continued to compose ragas, tour worldwide in sitar performances, and produce recordings. Among Shankar's many musical compositions are the scores for the motion pictures Pather Panchali (1954) and Charly (1968). He has collaborated with such musicians as conductor Zubin Mehta in the performance (1989) of his Sitar Concerto and with composer Philip Glass in their electronic recording Passages (1990). Shankar also served (1986-92) in India's parliament. His daughter, Anoushka Shankar, 1981-, who studied with her father, is also a virtuoso sitarist.
Bibliography
See his autobiographies, My Music, My Life (1969) and Raga Mala (1997, repr. 1999); D. Ghosh, ed., The Great Shankars: Uday, Ravi (1983); John Musilli, dir., Ravi Shankar and Friends (video documentary, 1976).
Born Robindro Shankar on April 7, 1920, in Benares, India; married Annapurna Allauddin, 1941; divorced, 1958; married Sukanya Rajan, 1989; children: (with Allauddin) Shubho, (with Rajan) Anouska.
Sitarist, conductor, and composer; international performer, 1956-; performed with George Harrison at Hollywood Bowl, 1967; published autobiography, My Music, My Life, 1968; performed as classicist, 1979; engaged in instruction and development of the arts in India, late 1980s-early 1990s; artistic director of ASIAD, the Olympic gathering of Asia, 1982; composer of music for films, including Father Panchali, Kabuliwala, and Ghandi, and for ballets; author of autobiography Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar, published, 1999; opened Ravi Shankar Centre in New Delhi, India, 2001; released Grammy Award-winning Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000, 2002.
Awards: Cannes Film Festival, first prize in musical direction for Father Fanchali, 1955; Berlin Film Festival, Silver Bear Prize for Best Film Score for Kabuliwala, late 1950s; President’s Medal (India) for film score for Anuradha, 1961, and for outstanding contribution to Indian music and culture, 1962; Grammy Award, Best Chamber Music Performance for West Meets East (with Yehudi Menuhin), 1967, and Album of the Year for the Concert For Bangladesh (with others), 1972; made Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2001; Grammy Award, Best World Music Album for Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000, 2002; honorary member of American Academy of Arts and Letters; elected fellow of Sangeet Natak Academy; awarded Padma Visbushan, India’s highest civilian honor.
From his small, low platform covered with Indian rugs, Ravi Shankar has brought the music of India to audiences around the world. He has introduced the sitar—a long-necked Indian Lute—to such new domains as film, ballet, and orchestra. A complete musician, he is renowned equally as a concert soloist, composer, and conductor. He is also one of the few composers to have been greatly appreciated and embraced by such diverse audiences as the classical, jazz, pop, ethnic, and New Age music circles. It seems inevitable that his greatest wish will come true: above all things to be remembered for his musical creations.
Shankar was born Robindro Shankar on April 7, 1920, in Benares, which is considered the holiest of cities in India. He was the youngest son of a family of Bengali Brahmins, coming from an upper-class background. When he was ten years old Ravi was sent to Paris where his eldest brother, the great dancer Uday Shankar, had a troupe of gifted Indian dancers and musicians. Ravi became quite successful and was soon billed as a star dancer in their tours of Europe and the United States. He also attended school in Paris where he met many great musicians who exposed him to Western music.
In 1935 Uday invited sarod master Ustad Allauddin Khan to join the company and play as the principle soloist. Ravi was deeply impressed by his playing and spent most of the following year acting as Allauddin Khan’s interpreter and guide in the hope of becoming his pupil. Before his departure Khan agreed to teach Ravi to play the sitar only if he gave up the fame and fortune of the artist’s life in Paris and came to study with him in Maihar, a small village in India.
After a year of soul-searching Ravi decided to go to Maihar and submerge himself in intensive study and total dedication to his guru, Allauddin Khan. He shaved his head, wore clothes of coarse material, and slept only four or five hours a night with a one-hour nap in the afternoon. Ravi would then practice for 12 hours a day, sometimes until his fingers bled. The rest of the time was devoted to study, prayer, and meditation with the guru. "When music is not written down and you learn by an oral tradition," Shankar was quoted as saying in the Washington Post, "what is transmitted by the guru is not merely a technique but a feeling. My guru taught me that the best way to worship is by music."
After seven and a half years of study, Ravi became a virtuoso and began playing concerts throughout India. He married his guru’s daughter, Annapurna, once he had established himself as a success. He then founded the Vadya Vrinda, the Indian National Orchestra at All-India Radio. For the next seven years, Shankar conducted most of the concerts and wrote some 200 compositions.
The Pioneer Period In 1956 Shankar made his American debut in New York City and was received with critical and public acclaim. This began what he has referred to as the pioneer stage of his career, where he gradually became well known to the classical world and was simultaneously discovered in jazz circles. At first he played to modest audiences in town halls, college auditoriums, and the smaller stages on both of the American coasts. His Manáger had trouble booking engagements in the Midwest at all. Although he was one of the first performers of classical Indian music to tour the United States, interest in his work grew rapidly, and within a matter of a few years he played Carnegie Hall.
In Europe Shankar quickly established himself as a musical phenomenon through collaboration with other classical masters. In 1958 he appeared at the UNESCO Music Festival in Paris, performing with the great violinists Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh. A couple of years later his first Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra was commissioned and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by André Previn. International recognition was decidedly achieved when Shankar wrote a composition for violin and sitar for Yehudi Menuhin and himself called "West Meets East." They appeared in concert at the United Nations to celebrate Human Rights Day. The album West Meets East won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance in 1967. Menuhin commented on the recording experience in Life magazine: "We sat incarcerated for three days in the aura of incense to which Ravi always plays. The whole object of the music lies in creating an aura which liberates men’s thoughts and demands complete surrender."
Shankar’s career suddenly shifted gears in the mid-1960s with the association of another gifted musician. In 1966 George Harrison heard one of Shankar’s albums and quickly arranged to meet him at a dinner party. Ravi was impressed by Harrison’s sincerity and reverence toward Indian music and invited him to come study in India. Harrison eventually spent seven weeks in India learning how to play the sitar but was required to return to England to rejoin the Beatles. To show his gratitude for the instruction, Harrison flew in to join Shankar at his Hollywood Bowl concert in the summer of 1967 and the two of them held press conferences and fielded questions regarding their collaboration.
The Superstar Period These events drew the attention of English and American youth cultures, which began attending Shankar’s concerts in droves. Almost overnight he achieved superstar status. His record company put out ads stating: "We love Ravi, do you?" Record sales leapt up and his asking price per concert doubled from $2,000 to $4,000. Full-color posters of him posing next to his sitar were sold in record shops everywhere. Now that he was a part of the youth culture, he was invited to play with pop and rock groups at the Monterey Pop Festival later that year and again at Woodstock in 1969.
Shankar, however, was not entirely pleased with this burst of popularity and often scolded his audiences for their lack of respect toward the music. He repeatedly explained to journalists that he was not an advocate of the drug culture and that he was never on drugs when he played but rather in a deep spiritual state. "Though I understand it I feel a little bit sorry to be appreciated from a wrong angle," Shankar was quoted as saying in Life magazine. "It’s a go-man-go attitude, not the proper one.… It’s not [the audience’s] fault that they are looking for instant Karma."
In 1971 Shankar joined Harrison for two sold-out charity concerts at Madison Square Garden to help the refugees of Bangladesh. At least $25,000 was raised from ticket sales and donated to the United Nations Children’s Fund. A three-album recording of the concert called The Concert for Bangladesh was later released and generated an additional $15 million for the refugees. The recording also won Album of the Year honors at the Grammy Awards in 1972. However, the strain of touring with Harrison and The Festival of India over the next few years finally got to Shankar and ultimately drove him to a nervous breakdown in 1975. He subsequently disappeared from the concert circuit for the next two years.
The Classicist Period When he returned to the stage, Shankar chose to play only venues for classical or ethnic music and thereby avoided the popular music following. This new phase began with a United States premiere of the Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra at Carnegie Hall with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Years later in an interview for Musical America, Shankar reflected on how his audience had changed from this point on in his career: "Yes, they have changed, changed for the better. It is no longer the esoteric, over-excited ethnic business it once was." He retained only a small percentage of the mass youth culture but kept a large following of Indian immigrants and Indian music lovers.
The next few years saw a creative burst for Shankar in which he combined the sitar with the music of other cultures. In 1979 he embarked on his "East Greets East" tour, which blended the classical music of Japan and India. He wrote the piece for Hosan Yamamoto, a master of the Japanese bass flute, and for koto expert Musumi Miyashita. Afterwards he wrote new music for the French flute virtuoso Jean-Pierre Rampal. In the following year the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Zubin Mehta, commissioned a second sitar concerto from Shankar. "The Garland of Ragas" or "Raga Mala" premiered at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall; this fusion of Indian music with Western classical orchestration was received with enthusiastic reviews.
In 1982 Shankar won great applause for his film score to the Academy Award-winning motion picture Ghandi. This was not unfamiliar territory for him, however. In the 1950s his film music to the Pather Panchali trilogy and to Kabuliwala had won him awards at the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin film festivals. These honors made him the first Indian musician to receive an award for best music direction from a foreign country. Shankar also composed film music for a number of American and European commercial movies, the most renowned being the incidental music to Jonathan Miller’s controversial version of Alice in Wonderland on BBC.
In 1984 Shankar turned his attention to teaching. He felt it was important to continue the ancient guru/disciple tradition, and taught classes restricted to eight or ten of the most talented students in India. Teaching was nothing new to Shankar. As early as 1967 he founded the Kinnara school of Indian music in Bombay. A few years later he opened another branch in Los Angeles. He also chaired the department of Indian Music at the California Institute of Art. Afterwards he was to be the first musician invited as a Challigar Professor at City College in New York City. Even his autobiography, My Music, My Life, is still used as a textbook in ethnic music college courses.
In July of 1988 the Palace of Culture of the Soviet Union premiered Shankar’s "Swar Milan," although the recording of the concert was called Inside the Kremlin. It was an epic piece with seven passages, using more than 140 musicians and singers from the Russian Folk Ensemble, the Chamber Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic, the Government Chorus from the Ministry of Culture, and Shankar’s own Indian ensemble. The composition was successful in bringing together the various music of these greatly different cultures, and once again Shankar was able to create a completely new sound.
Ballet is yet another music medium to which he has contributed extensively over the years. Starting as far back as 1967, Shankar received great recognition for his American debut of Samanya Ksnati. He later wrote two other ballets, India Immortal and Discovery of India, which were inspired primarily by his native history and mythology. Both were well received critically and were considered landmarks in contemporary ballet music. 1990 saw the United States premiere of the ballet Ghyanshyam: The Broken Branch. It was about a dancer addicted to drugs; Shankar wrote it because he wanted to promote the need for a spiritual resurgence in modern society.
Musical Legacy Since then Shankar has spent most of his time in India teaching and playing concerts. There has been a renaissance in the arts there, and he continues to contribute to it generously and innovatively. He has developed multimedia projects that involve music, dance, film, and performance art based on Indian themes. In 1990 he collaborated with minimalist composer Philip Glass and released an album of new age music called Passages. An autobiography, Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar, which was edited by George Harrison, was published in 1999. It inspired the documentary Ravi Shankar, Between Two Worlds, released in 2002. Shankar made what was reported to be a "farewell tour" in 2001, but he indicated his intention to continuing performing in Down Beat "This is a final American tour.… As long as my body and mind permit, and as long as people want to hear me, I intend to continue to give performances … for special events." Shankar was made Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2001 and won the Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for the live album Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 in 2002.
Although he continues to create music and tour, Shankar has focused a great deal of attention on the Ravi Shankar Centre in New Delhi, a school for exceptional students of the traditional Indian system of gurukul learning and archive of Shankar’s work, established in 2001. Shankar hoped to make the centre "a structure which will be a universal home of peace through the essence of music and related arts," he told Iris Brooks of World and I. Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka, has become a renown sitarist in her own right. She tours with her father and has released solo work on CD.
Selected discography Ravi Shankar, India’s Master Musician, World-Pacific, 1958. Improvisations, World-Pacific, 1962. Ravi Shankar, Portrait of Genius, Angel, 1964. India’s Master Musician: Ravi Shankar, EMI, 1964. Ragas and Talas, Angel, 1964. Menuhin Meets Shankar, Angel, 1966. The Sound of the Sitar, World-Pacific, BGO, 1966. The Sounds of India: Ravi Shankar, Columbia, 1966. Three Ragas, Capitol, 1966. Exotic Sitar and Sarod, Capitol, 1967. Ravi Shankar in San Francisco, World-Pacific, 1967. Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Festival, Angel, 1967. Two Raga Moods, Capitol, 1967. West Meets East (two volumes), Angel, 1967. A Morning Raga, An Evening Raga, Angel, 1968. Chappaqua (soundtrack), Columbia, 1968. Charly (soundtrack), World-Pacific, 1968. Ravi Shankar in New York, World-Pacific, 1968. Ravi Shankar, Capitol, 1968. Six Ragas, Capitol, 1968. Ravi Shankar at the Woodstock Festival, World-Pacific, 1970. Raga (soundtrack), Apple, 1971. Shankar: Concerto # 1 for Sitar and Orchestra, Angel, 1971. (Contributor) The Concert for Bangladesh, Apple, 1971. In Concert, Apple, 1972. Transmigration Macabre, Spark, 1973. Shankar Family and Friends, Dark Horse/A&M, 1974. Raga Parameshwari, Capitol, 1976. Ravi Shankar’s Festival From India, Dark Horse/A&M, 1976. Easf Greets East, Deutsche Grammophon, 1978. Ragas Hameer and Gara, Deutsche Grammophon, 1979. Homage to Mahatma Ghandi and Baba Allauddin, Deutsche Grammophon, 1981. Ghandi (soundtrack), RCA, 1982. Inside the Kremlin, Private Music, 1989. (With Philip Glass) Passages, Private Music, 1990. (Contributor) The Tiger and the Brahmin, Kid Rhino, 1992. Farewell, My Friend, EMI India, 1992. Ravi Shankar, Deutsche Grammophon, 1993. In Celebration (4-CD box set), Angel, 1995. Chants of India, Angel, 1997. Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 (live), Angel, 2001.
Periodicals Down Beat, March 2002. Frets Magazine, November 1979. Life, August 18, 1967. Musical America, September 1982. New York Times, December 27, 1968; January 5, 1972;December 14, 1974; November 12, 1979; March 16, 1980;September 13, 1985; April 24, 1987; December 24, 1990. People, November 9, 1998. Pittsburgh Magazine, October 1984. PR Newswire, February 8, 2001. Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1999. Time, June 14, 1968. Twin Citian (Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN), December 1967. Washington Post, June 19, 1985. World and I, March 2002.
Born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi into an orthodox, well-off Brahmin family, Rabindra Shankar Chowdery's father, ShyÆm Shankar, was employed as a diwan (minister) by the Maharajah of Jhalawar. By the age of 13, Ravi Shankar was going along on every tour of his brother Uday Shankar's Compaigne de Danse et Musique Hindou (Company of Hindu Dance and Music). At the All-Bengali Music Conference in December 1934, he met the multi-instrumentalist Allauddin Khan. Precisely when Allauddin Khan was born is uncertain. People hazard dates in the 1860s around 1862, but in later years he himself gave his age haphazardly. He would transform many musicians' lives, but he had an incalculable effect on Ali Akbar (his son), Annapurna Devi (his daughter), and Shankar himself.
Allauddin Khan joined Uday's troupe as its principal soloist around 1935-1936.
In 1938, Shankar gave up a potential career as a dancer and went to study with Allauddin Khan in Maihar. In 1939, he began giving public recitals and came out of training at the end of 1944. Until 1948, he based himself in Bombay and gave programs all over India. He toured and wrote for films and ballet. Around this time he began his recording career with a small session for HMV (India). Work for All India Radio followed; as music director from February 1949 to January 1956 in New Delhi. Concurrently, his international star was on the rise. In 1954, he performed in the Soviet Union. In 1956, he played his debut solo concerts in Western Europe and the U.S. Within a decade he would be the most famous Indian musician on the planet. Within two decades he would become probably the most famous Indian alive. His English-language autobiography, My Music, My Life (1969), is still one of the best general introductions to Hindustani music.
Shankar is not one-dimensional. Apart from pursuing a career as a classical performer, he has also experimented outside this field. For this reason he has attracted criticism from purists. Some of this, especially during the Beatles era, undoubtedly had an element of jealousy to it; some was certainly warranted, because Shankar did take many chances. In fact, that was one of the things that kept his music exciting. To use a cricketing image -- baseball would be wholly inappropriate -- Shankar's batting average has remained high throughout a long and illustrious career. ~ Ken Hunt, Rovi
Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to by the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.[1]
Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.
In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.
Shankar was born 7 April 1920 in Varanasi to a Brahmin family of Bengalis as the youngest of seven brothers.[2][3][4] Shankar's Bengali birth name was Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury.[2] His father, Shyam Shankar, an administrator for the Maharaja of Jhalawar, used the Sanskrit spelling of the family name and removed its last part.[2][5] Shyam was married to Shankar's mother Hemangini Devi, but later worked as a lawyer in London.[2] There he married a second time while Devi raised Shankar in Varanasi, and did not meet his son until he was eight years old.[2] Shankar shortened the Sanskrit version of his first name, Ravindra, to Ravi, for "sun".[2]
At the age of ten, after spending his first decade in Varanasi, Shankar went to Paris with the dance group of his brother, choreographer Uday Shankar.[6][7] By the age of 13 he had become a member of the group, accompanied its members on tour and learned to dance and play various Indian instruments.[3][4] Uday's dance group toured Europe and America in the early to mid-1930s and Shankar learned French, discovered Western classical music, jazz, and cinema, and became acquainted with Western customs.[8] Shankar heard the lead musician for the Maihar court, Allauddin Khan, in December 1934 at a music conference in Kolkata and Uday convinced the Maharaja of Maihar in 1935 to allow Khan to become his group's soloist for a tour of Europe.[8] Shankar was sporadically trained by Khan on tour, and Khan offered Shankar training to become a serious musician under the condition that he abandon touring and come to Maihar.[8]
Career
Training and work in India
Shankar's parents had died by the time he returned from the European tour, and touring the West had become difficult due to political conflicts that would lead to World War II.[9] Shankar gave up his dancing career in 1938 to go to Maihar and study Indian classical music as Khan's pupil, living with his family in the traditional gurukul system.[6] Khan was a rigorous teacher and Shankar had training on sitar and surbahar, learned ragas and the musical styles dhrupad, dhamar, and khyal, and was taught the techniques of the instruments rudra veena, rubab, and sursingar.[6][10] He often studied with Khan's children Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi.[9] Shankar began to perform publicly on sitar in December 1939 and his debut performance was a jugalbandi (duet) with Ali Akbar Khan, who played the string instrument sarod.[11]
Shankar completed his training in 1944.[3] Following his training, he moved to Mumbai and joined the Indian People's Theatre Association, for whom he composed music for ballets in 1945 and 1946.[3][12] Shankar recomposed the music for the popular song "Sare Jahan Se Achcha" at the age of 25.[13][14] He began to record music for HMV India and worked as a music director for All India Radio (AIR), New Delhi, from February 1949 to January 1956.[3] Shankar founded the Indian National Orchestra at AIR and composed for it; his compositions experimented with a combination of Western instruments and classical Indian instrumentation.[15] Beginning in the mid-1950s he composed the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, which became internationally acclaimed.[4][16]
International career 1956–1969
Tabla player Alla Rakha, who was a frequent accompanist of Shankar, in 1988
V. K. Narayana Menon, director of AIR Delhi, introduced the Western violinist Yehudi Menuhin to Shankar during Menuhin's first visit to India in 1952.[17] Shankar had performed as part of a cultural delegation in the Soviet Union in 1954 and Menuhin invited Shankar in 1955 to perform in New York City for a demonstration of Indian classical music, sponsored by the Ford Foundation.[18][19] Shankar declined to attend due to problems in his marriage, but recommended Ali Akbar Khan to play instead.[19] Khan reluctantly accepted and performed with tabla (percussion) player Chatur Lal in the Museum of Modern Art, and he later became the first Indian classical musician to perform on American television and record a full raga performance, for Angel Records.[20]
Shankar heard about the positive response Khan received and resigned from AIR in 1956 to tour the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States.[21] He played for smaller audiences and educated them about Indian music, incorporating ragas from the South IndianCarnatic music in his performances, and recorded his first LP albumThree Ragas in London, released in 1956.[21] In 1958, Shankar participated in the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the United Nations and UNESCO music festival in Paris.[12] From 1961, he toured Europe, the United States, and Australia, and became the first Indian to compose music for non-Indian films.[12] Chatur Lal accompanied Shankar on tabla until 1962, when Alla Rakha assumed the role.[21] Shankar founded the Kinnara School of Music in Mumbai in 1962.[22]
Shankar befriended Richard Bock, founder of World Pacific Records, on his first American tour and recorded most of his albums in the 1950s and 1960s for Bock's label.[21]The Byrds recorded at the same studio and heard Shankar's music, which led them to incorporate some of its elements in theirs, introducing the genre to their friend George Harrison of The Beatles.[23] Harrison became interested in Indian classical music, bought a sitar and used it to record the song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)".[24] This led to Indian music being used by other musicians and created the raga rock trend.[24]
Harrison met Shankar in London in 1966 and visited India for six weeks to study sitar under Shankar in Srinagar.[14][25][26] During the visit, a documentary film about Shankar named Raga was shot by Howard Worth, and released in 1971.[27] Shankar's association with Harrison greatly increased Shankar's popularity and Ken Hunt of Allmusic would state that Shankar had become "the most famous Indian musician on the planet" by 1966.[3][25] In 1967, he performed at the Monterey Pop Festival and won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for West Meets East, a collaboration with Yehudi Menuhin.[25][28] The same year, the Beatles won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which included "Within You Without You" by Harrison, a song that was influenced by Indian classical music.[26][28] Shankar opened a Western branch of the Kinnara School of Music in Los Angeles, California, in May 1967, and published an autobiography, My Music, My Life, in 1968.[12][22] He performed at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, and found he disliked the venue.[25] In the 1970s Shankar distanced himself from the hippie movement.[29]
During the 1970s, Shankar and Harrison worked together again, recording Shankar Family & Friends in 1973 and touring North America the following year to a mixed response after Shankar had toured Europe with the Harrison-sponsored Music Festival from India.[33] The demanding schedule weakened Shankar, and he suffered a heart attack in Chicago in November 1974, causing him to miss a portion of the tour.[34] In his absence, Shankar's sister-in-law, singer Lakshmi Shankar, conducted the touring orchestra.[34] The touring band visited the White House on invitation of John Gardner Ford, son of US president Gerald Ford.[34] Shankar toured and taught for the remainder of the 1970s and the 1980s and released his second concerto, Raga Mala, conducted by Zubin Mehta, in 1981.[35][36] Shankar was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score for his work on the 1982 movie Gandhi, but lost to John Williams' E.T.[37] He served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Parliament of India, from 12 May 1986 to 11 May 1992, after being nominated by Indian Prime MinisterRajiv Gandhi.[14][38] Shankar composed the dance drama Ghanashyam in 1989.[22] His liberal views on musical cooperation led him to collaboration with contemporary composer Philip Glass, with whom he released an album, Passages, in 1990.[6]
Shankar underwent an angioplasty in 1992 due to heart problems, after which George Harrison involved himself in several of Shankar's projects.[39] Because of the positive response to Shankar's 1996 career compilation In Celebration, Shankar wrote a second autobiography, Raga Mala, with Harrison as editor.[39] He performed in between 25 and 40 concerts every year during the late 1990s.[6] Shankar taught his daughter Anoushka Shankar to play sitar and in 1997 became a Regent's Lecturer at University of California, San Diego.[40] In the 2000s, he won a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for Full Circle: Carnegie Hall 2000 and toured with Anoushka, who released a book about her father, Bapi: Love of My Life, in 2002.[28][41] Anoushka performed a composition by Shankar for the 2002 Harrison memorial Concert for George and Shankar wrote a third concerto for sitar and orchestra for Anoushka and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.[42][43] In June 2008, Shankar played what was billed as his last European concert,[29] but his 2011 tour includes dates in the United Kingdom.[44]
Shankar developed a style distinct from that of his contemporaries and incorporated influences from rhythm practices of Carnatic music.[6] His performances begin with solo alap, jor, and jhala (introduction and performances with pulse and rapid pulse) influenced by the slow and serious dhrupad genre, followed by a section with tabla accompaniment featuring compositions associated with the prevalent khyal style.[6] Shankar often closes his performances with a piece inspired by the light-classical thumri genre.[6]
Shankar has been considered one of the top sitar players of the second half of the 20th century.[1] He popularized performing on the bass octave of the sitar for the alap section and became known for a distinctive playing style in the middle and high registers that uses quick and short deviations of the playing string and his sound creation through stops and strikes on the main playing string.[1][6] Narayana Menon of The New Grove Dictionary noted Shankar's liking for rhythmic novelties, among them the use of unconventional rhythmic cycles.[45] Hans Neuhoff of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart has argued that Shankar's playing style was not widely adopted and that he was surpassed by other sitar players in the performance of melodic passages.[1] Shankar's interplay with Alla Rakha improved appreciation for tabla playing in Hindustani classical music.[1] Shankar promoted the jugalbandi duet concert style and introduced new ragas, including Tilak Shyam, Nat Bhairav and Bairagi.[6]
Shankar married Allauddin Khan's daughter Annapurna Devi in 1941 and a son, Shubhendra Shankar, was born in 1942.[10] Shankar separated from Devi during the 1940s and had a relationship with Kamala Shastri, a dancer, beginning in the late 1940s.[56] An affair with Sue Jones (producer), a New York concert producer, led to the birth of Norah Jones in 1979.[56] In 1981, Anoushka Shankar was born to Shankar and Sukanya Rajan, whom Shankar had known since the 1970s.[56] After separating from Kamala Shastri in 1981, Shankar lived with Sue Jones until 1986. He married Sukanya Rajan in 1989.[56]
Shubhendra "Shubho" Shankar often accompanied his father on tours.[57] He could play the sitar and surbahar, but elected not to pursue a solo career and died in 1992.[57] Norah Jones became a successful musician in the 2000s, winning eight Grammy Awards in 2003.[58] Anoushka Shankar was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 2003.[58]
Ghosh, Dibyendu (December 1983). "A Humble Homage to the Superb". In Ghosh, Dibyendu. The Great Shankars. Kolkata: Agee Prakashani. p. 7. OCLC15483971.
Ghosh, Dibyendu (December 1983). "Ravishankar". In Ghosh, Dibyendu. The Great Shankars. Kolkata: Agee Prakashani. p. 55. OCLC15483971.
Slawek, Stephen (2001). "Shankar, Ravi". In Sadie, Stanley. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 23 (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan Publishers. ISBN0333608003.
External links
Find more about Ravi Shankar on Wikipedia's sister projects:
Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Ravi Shankar. Read more
