Anoushka Shankar in Echoes Podcast.

Hear Anoushka Shankar & Nitin Sawhney Talk about Traces of You in Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto and Anoushka Shankar on Echoes

Ravi Shankar passed away in December of 2012. He left an incredible legacy, scores of disciples and two daughters who have achieved their own kind of fame, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones.  The two sisters got together while Shankar was in the process of dying and recorded a beautiful homage called Traces of You.  At the same time, Indian-English producer Nitin Sawhney had lost his own father.  He joined Anoushka to produce the album, co-compose more than half the tracks and play guitar and  piano and programming.  I talk about traces of those who’ve passed with Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney.

Anoushka Shankar: I kind of started making a record that was going to be about life, and life is a journey and the journey kind of became things I couldn’t have anticipated, but that was kind of the whole ironic point really…is that, is that it is a journey and so I just sort of allowed myself to, to follow that.

Anoushka Shankar on “In Jytoti’s Name”: No, it’s angry. That sitar melody came from a place of rage, you know.  I was really angry and kind of wrote a melody that was quite minor and dark, and yet you know, by the time I was adding the percussion and stuff, but you know, there’s anger and there’s also a passing through that anger that has to happen.

Hear Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney talk about Traces of You  in the Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB SPECIAL

New members of the Echoes CD of the Month Club will get Moby’s Innocents album, our November CD of the Month and a BONUS CD of Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Tales from the Grand Bazaar.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.  You’ll also get the new Echoes CD, Transmissions: The Echoes Living Room Concerts V19, You can do it all right here. You

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

A Musical Dynasty: Anoushka & Norah After Ravi Shankar

Tonight on Echoes, Anoushka Shankar & Nitin Sawhney

Ravi Shankar passed away in December of 2012. He left an incredible legacy, scores of disciples and two daughters who have achieved their own kind of fame, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones.  The two sisters got together while Shankar was in the process of dying and recorded a beautiful homage called Traces of You.  At the same time, Indian-English producer Nitin Sawhney had lost his own father.  He joined Anoushka to produce the album, co-compose more than half the tracks and play guitar and  piano and programming.  I talk about traces of those who’ve passed with Anoushka Shankar and Nitin Sawhney.

Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar, Norah Jones

Anoushka Shankar: I kind of started making a record that was going to be about life, and life is a journey and the journey kind of became things I couldn’t have anticipated, but that was kind of the whole ironic point really…is that, is that it is a journey and so I just sort of allowed myself to, to follow that.

Anoushka Shankar on “In Jytoti’s Name”: No, it’s angry. That sitar melody came from a place of rage, you know.  I was really angry and kind of wrote a melody that was quite minor and dark, and yet you know, by the time I was adding the percussion and stuff, but you know, there’s anger and there’s also a passing through that anger that has to happen.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

ECHOES CD OF THE MONTH CLUB SPECIAL

New members of the Echoes CD of the Month Club will get Moby’s Innocents album, our November CD of the Month and a BONUS CD of Bombay Dub Orchestra’s Tales from the Grand Bazaar.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.  You’ll also get the new Echoes CD, Transmissions: The Echoes Living Room Concerts V19, You can do it all right here. You

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Ali Akbar Khan Plucks His Last String

Echoes remembers Ali Akbar Khan (April 14,1922-June 19, 2009)

Ali Akbar Khan is one of the only Indian musicians whose name is spoken in the same breathe as Ravi Shankar.  He plays the Indian stringed instrument called the sarod and since his American debut in 1955 playing duets with classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin, he’s been a leading proponent of Indian classical music in the west.  If you were on the west coast and beat a tabla or plucked a sitar, you probably passed through the Ali Akbar College of Music.

We talked with Khansab in 1994 when he’d just released an album of Westernized raga melodies called Journey.

I remember Khansab seated in the music room of his tiny Marin County bungalow. The walls were covered with Indian murals, tanpuras and icons.  A stack of shelves held several of his sarods, a stringed Indian instrument that sounds like a sitar with resonant strings but with a fretless fingerboard.  On one wall hung his first miniature sarod, which his father made from an old violin. He was a short, portly man, whose speech was barely intelligible beneath his gruff, rumbling tone and Indian accent.  He said he learned many of his ragas from his father.

“There are 25,000 ragas, melodies,” grumbled Khansab.  “You have to listen to learn in each other, you must learn at least 500 for your completion.  And by practicing, by thinking this, then you know it, you can feel it and it’s like a love.  When a child talks to its mother, mother talks to her child.  This comes out from their heart.  They never compose beforehand.  So that kind of attitude you need for real music.”

Whether playing with classical violinists or cross-over music, Ali Akbar Khan insisted that he never sacrificed the depth and meaning of Indian music.

“That meaning is very difficult to explain,” he revealed.  “I only know that through music you can reach to God.  And it’s such a wonderful thing which can bring peace to all of the place.  The people listen, the people they perform and it’s a very, very wonderful things.  But I am telling you each note can explain many things you can’t speak or write.”

Ali Akbar Khan passed today, June 19, 2009 at the age of 87.  With Ali Akbar Khan joining tabla master Alla Rahka, that leaves Ravi Shankar as the last of the triumvirate that brought Indian music to the west.  From Morgan Doctor to Jai Uttal, Matthew Montfort to Ravi Shankar, there is rarely a musician I’ve spoken to who hasn’t been touched by his music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Twilight of a Titan: Ravi Shankar Plays Kimmel Center at 88

I don’t know how many giants of music were still mounting the concert stage at 88 years of age, but Ravi Shankar did once again last night at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. Performing with his daughter, Anoushka, who is substantially younger than 88 at 27 years old, Shankar once again enthralled the audience, taking them on a journey that included ancient evening ragas and “Yankee Doodle.” 

Ravi Shankar

Shankar is frail now. He’s helped on stage by his assistant and tanpura player, Kenji Ota and he doesn’t sit cross-legged anymore. Instead, he rests at the edge of the riser, his feet on the floor as his assistant places the sitar in his lap. It’s a modified instrument that’s smaller with a flattened back and no head stock. As he settles into position, you wonder if he’ll be able to play at all. But once the music starts, Shankar steps into another world articulating a fractal forest, full of symetrical patterns and asymetrical melodies.  As he bends into the alap, the opening, free movement of each piece, notes seem to unfold, slowly bending into microtonal curves. It’s when the gat, or rhythmic section kicks in, that you can hear the change in Shankar’s playing. He’s no longer the speed demon, scorching the frets in arabesque runs. Instead, he’s more like a road-worn blues musician, bending into notes, tossing out sketches of licks, placing points along the lines of the melody. Anoushka, on the other hand, is a speed demon, and while she took on a secondary role to her father, she stepped out on several fiery runs.

Ravi Shankar has always had a sense of humor about his music, but there’s an even greater lightness to his

Anoushka Shankar

performance now that I don’t recall from earlier concerts. He said he’d be dropping in folk melodies into one raga. I expected that to mean Indian folk melodies, not “Yankee Doodle,” which popped in as kind of a Philadelphia homage. I wonder if he plays “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in California or “New York, New York” in that city?

Ravi Shankar is one of the titans of modern music. Writing about his In Celebration retrospective album in CD Review, I said:

Ravi Shankar isn’t the only sitarist and he may not even be the best, but he’s left his imprint on Indian and world music the same way Charlie Parker changed jazz and Jimi Hendrix shaped the electric guitar. He brought Indian music to the world and inadvertently paved the way for minimalism and the New Age, The Edge and John Coltrane.

Through his teachings, Ravi Shankar has seeded disciples around the world, not the least of whom is his daughter Anoushka, a worthy heir apparent. You never know much time we’ll have on this planet. Shankar’s 1960s partner, tabla icon Alla Rahka, passed at age 80, and his much younger disciple, George Harrison, only made it to 58. So I’m grateful to have yet another opportunity to see this master materialize a maze of melody and rhythm one more time. 

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))