Ravi Shankar
Sitar hero to most.
IN NOVEMBER, it will be a decade since Ravi Shankar’s final performance; when he first toured Europe – as a dancer with his brother Uday’s troupe – Hindenburg was German chancellor and the swastika was everywhere, which must have seemed welcoming to a young Hindu from Varanasi. If Shankar’s 92 years on this planet covered most of the 20th century, the span of his music is no less impressive – Indian classical music, of course, but also its Western equivalent, and jazz, ambient and folk, plus his influence on, and presence at, some of the most significant developments in rock.
Born in 1920 to a well-to-do political family, Shankar gave up dancing to study the sitar, an instrument that puts great physical strain on the player, not least because of the contortions required to sit hunched over it for lengthy periods. In the 1940s, he moved to Delhi, then a “green and unpolluted place”, to work for All India Radio, which brought him into contact with the film director Satyajit Ray and the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin, two men responsible for boosting his profile beyond India – the former by asking him to compose soundtracks, the latter by putting in motion a tour of the US. Fifteen years later, he was hanging with
The Beatles and part of Monterey and Woodstock lore.
The rest is history, of course, and hopefully a more complete story will be revealed through the following 10 albums. Unusually for a How To Buy, where the smart way in would usually be to start with Number 1, we would suggest the gateway here is Number 10, then you can dig progressively deeper. Don’t be put off by the aura of spirituality or any gaps in your knowledge of Indian culture or classical music: the top slot is as catchy and potent as anything the Fab Four could have done in 1963.
And now, to paraphrase the great man at the Concert for Bangladesh (and many, many shows after): “If you liked this preamble so much, I hope you will like the music more.”
“The top slot is as catchy and potent as anything the Fab Four could have done in 1963.”