Sitarist ‘cleansed’ himself after pop stardom
Indian virtuoso decried ‘strange young weirdos’
Ravi Shankar always displayed a slightly ambivalent attitude to the extraordinary enthusiasm with which his music — sober-minded, serious, not a little taxing — was greeted by younger western audiences in the 1960s.
Shankar died Tuesday at age 92 in San Diego, Calif., with his wife and a daughter by his side.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called him a “national treasure.”
Called “the godfather of world music” by Beatle and pupil George Harrison, Shankar helped millions of classical, jazz and rock lovers discover the centuries-old traditions of Indian music.
But the attraction gave Shankar decidedly mixed feelings.
At Madison Square Garden in 1971, in the celebrated Concert for Bangladesh that Harrison had organized, the first plangent chords of Shankar’s sitar playing were received with rapturous applause, obliging him to lecture the audience:
“If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing even more.”
The confusion was understandable. Until Ravi Shankar, most people in the west were familiar with Indian music — if at all — only as background noise in restaurants, and would not have been in a position to discern the fine distinction between a morning raga and evening one, or even know whether in Shankar they were listening to a virtuoso or a rank beginner
Violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin once said Shankar had a “genius and humanity” to rival Mozart. And it was Menuhin who invited Shankar to make his first appearance in New York in 1955. Shankar was unable to accept, so his brother-in-law, Ali Akbar Khan, a virtuoso of the sarod (or short-necked lute; the sitar is a long-necked lute), played to great acclaim instead.
Shankar made his London and New York debuts in 1956. But it was in the 1960s that superstardom arrived, when the Beatles professed their admiration. Harrison had discovered Shankar through the folk-rock pioneers the Byrds, who had heard Shankar’s music when sharing a studio with the sitar player in Los Angeles. Harrison used a sitar in the song Norwegian Wood, and shortly afterwards, in 1966, befriended Shankar and took lessons from him.
But Shankar could be a fastidious man. The rock audiences who came to pay homage he haughtily dismissed in his autobiography as “these strange young weirdos.” His appearances at the Monterey and Woodstock festivals — the great quasi-religious gatherings of the alternative society — were apparently painful ordeals, where the audiences were “shrieking, shouting, smoking, masturbating and copulating — all in a drug-crazed state. … I used to tell them, ‘You don’t behave like that when you go to hear a Bach, Beethoven or Mozart concert.’ ”
It is odd to reflect on just how novel was the sound of the sitar in the mid-’60s.
Historians and pedants will dispute whether the instrument made its first appearance on a pop record with the Kinks’ 1965 hit See My Friends or on the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood, featuring Harrison playing a cheap sitar he had bought in a store called India Craft after hearing Shankar’s recordings, and which was released in the same year.
For Ravi Shankar, for whom playing the sitar was a spiritual calling as well as a musical one, it was a cause of evident unhappiness to find the instrument he loved in lesser hands, and played in a bastardized form as a lazy musical shorthand for a wigged-out psychedelic experience. So distressed was he by the way his music was — as he saw it — misunderstood by pop audiences that after Woodstock he decided to “cleanse” himself by performing only in concert halls.
Shankar’s father was an eminent Bengali scholar and lawyer, who abandoned the family shortly after Ravi’s birth. Shankar would not meet him until he was eight years old. More influential was his elder brother Uday, a dancer and choreographer who established the first Indian dance troupe to perform in the west. The young Ravi toured Europe as a dancer and musician before returning to India to study the sitar under the master Allaudin Khan, and eventually emerging as the foremost virtuoso of the instrument.
Shankar’s personal life was complicated: His 1941 marriage to Annapurna Devi ended in divorce. And though he had a decades-long relationship with dancer Kamala Shastri that ended in 1981, he had relationships with several other women in the 1970s.
In 1979, he fathered Norah Jones with New York concert promoter Sue Jones, and in 1981, Sukanya Rajan, an instrumentalist in his ensemble, gave birth to his daughter Anoushka.
Shankar could be a man of baffling contradictions, whose outward appearance of humility and spirituality could disguise a certain hauteur. Reflecting fondly on his faithful and long-serving tab- la-player, Alla Rakha, who accompanied him for 27 years, Shankar once observed that he was finally obliged to dispense with his services: not because Rakha was “rather fond of a drink or two,” not even because of his strange obsession with Bonanza and Hawaii Five-O, but because “I needed someone younger, not only as an accompanist but to carry all my shoulder bags.”
Shankar always resented the western tendency of “segregating off ” Indian classical music as “ethnic” music, and therefore less deserving of serious consideration. His death comes just six days after he earned his most recent Grammy Award nomination for Best World Music Album for his 2012 recording, The Living Room Sessions, Part 1.
Of course, the category would not have existed but for Shankar. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a revolutionary — and always an uncompromising one. A few years ago, he performed at Womad, the mecca of world music. At the beginning of his performance he felt it necessary once more to reprimand the audience, for making too much noise. He was trying to tune up.