‘I’ve been trying to take the sitar out of its comfort zone’
Indian sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar speaks to Preeti Singh about her recent album and her attempts to take fusion music beyond the East-meets-West stereotype.
cultural mixing? A.
Organic is what I strived for. I listen to many forms of music. And I come from a very particular style and tradition of music, which has certain elements that are absolutely unique and, therefore, important to the world. But that doesn’t mean I think it’s better than other music. I receive so many things from different forms of music and consider them all equal. I try to be as culturally sensitive as possible. I try and approach other music with sensitivity. And, if it’s music I don’t know, I try and work with other people who are wellversed in it, so that it’s done sensitively. I do feel that, with this album I have reached another level of working on multiple levels, so that it feels less like cultures meeting, and more like cultures being together. I think we’re many generations on now, and its not just about “East meets West” anymore. It’s about a new level of integration. And I think part of that was looking at my instrument as well.
Q. Would it be incorrect to consider an extension of your 2011 album because a refugee is also a traveller? A.
Land Of Gold Traveller,
Though Traveller did trace the journey of the gypsies from India to Spain, it was such a historical concept that the premise became a lot more joyful, and about a celebration of the melding of cultures that ensued from that journey. In contrast, today, I watch so many societies starting to reject that interaction between cultures, and a sense of isolationism growing in many of the places I travel to. This makes me very sad. So though the themes are connected, the angle on each of them is very different.
Q. also includes guest appearances
Land of Gold
by rapper and refugee advocate M.I.A., singer/ songwriter Alev Lenz, jazz double bassist Larry Grenadier, and dancer Akram Khan among many other multi-talented musicians. What made you collaborate with so many musicians? A.
Collaboration has been important to me from the beginning, and I’ve had good experience over the last decade of working in tandem with musicians from various cultures. There are many challenges to working within music that straddle styles in the way that Land of Gold does, and one of the key desires when we set out was to make sure everything sounded authentic and integrated in a holistic manner. I feel we achieved this, even though it was challenging at times. The album was designed around a core quartet of myself, my co-writer Delago on hangs and percussion, Sanjeev Shankar on Shehnai and Larry Grenadier on bass. This core sound brings in all the key elements of rhythms, strings, wind and low-end grounding harmony. Beyond this, we approached choosing the special guests almost like casting a movie– thinking of everyone in terms of music but also what they represented in the context of the story of the album.
Q. You make it a point to perform in India every year. Can we say that it is your way of paying homage to your country? A.
I think my upbringing was a huge part of the way I look at the world — and the way I work on my music. I consider myself a part of all three cultures which formed me, Indian, British and American. At the moment I’m enjoying a new phrase I’ve coined, and tell people who ask that: I’m “tricultural.” It’s simply a truthful answer to explain how I genuinely feel that I am a product of three cultures, and also of the experience of moving between them and all the confusions and opportunities that can ensue from such a situation. As someone growing up across three continents, I always felt as if I had many homes, but no home. In the last few years, I have managed to make a feeling of home with my family and I feel more rooted and settled than I did before. However, perhaps because of my peripatetic childhood, home has always been an internal, spiritual concept, as someone comfortable in themselves can learn to be comfortable anywhere.
Q. Coming from a family of the greatest sitar players in the world, do you thing this legacy overshadows you? A.
At times I’ve tussled with my legacy, at times I’ve been proud of it, or afraid of it, or simply tried my best to ignore it! I’ve had to extricate and separate the entwined aspect of this legacy. For me, there is no part of me that wants to leave behind the fact that my father is my guru. That is a central current running through my music and I wouldn’t be where I am without his teaching. Separately, I’ve felt diminished and frustrated by the fact that, in some eyes, no matter what I’ve done over a 20- plusyear career, I’m constantly only viewed as someone’s daughter. Being a daughter and being a disciple are two different things in my mind, and I think they can get too tangled up in other peoples’ minds. Having said all that, acceptance that that’s the way things are is the only way to achieve any kind of sanity around it all. I just try to keep my head down and do my work the best I can.
“For me, there is no part of me that wants to leave behind the fact that my father is my guru. That is a central current running through my music and I wouldn’t be where I am without his teaching. Separately, I’ve felt diminished and frustrated by the fact that, in some eyes, no matter what I’ve done over a 20-plus-year career, I’m constantly only viewed as someone’s daughter. Being a daughter and being a disciple are two different things in my mind, and I think they can get too tangled up in other peoples’ minds.”
Q. Tell us something about balancing the duality — the purity of Indian classical music with that of music that has evolved and is relevant to the masses, music that connects with people as a modern concept? How have you evolved as a musician in doing so? A.
I classify myself as someone who is genuinely attempting to retain and pass on in the future a certain level of the old tradition without it being watered down. And that too in a black and white manner because tradition is never static. So I’m not passing on what the music was like 300 years ago. I don’t have any desire for things to be frozen in time or to be bogged down with thousands of rules and regulations. What I do is give people the essence of what it feels like to go to a classical Indian concert. To really hear and feel what a raga is, opened and explored and performed in its own element as opposed to the way it sounds when you hear some bars in a Western song which may sound absolutely stunning, but it’s not the same as hearing it in its own element. I guess what I’m hoping is to continue to be both because I don’t want to live without either.