Ravi Shankar
For many casual listeners, Indian classical music is synonymous with the name Ravi Shankar. From the 1960s to the present, this sitarist and composer has captured the imagination of fans across the globe not just as a self-contained artist but also as an ambassador for Indian music and culture more broadly.
While many believe that Pandit Ravi Shankar was introduced to the West (and vice versa) via his association with the Beatles, that assumption couldn't be further from the truth. Born in 1920 in the Hindu holy city of Benares, Shankar possessed a richly musical and cosmopolitan life from a very early age. In the 1930s, when he was a mere teenager, he was already appearing on the great stages of the world, from New York's Carnegie Hall to Paris's Thêatre du Champs-Elysées, as a dancer and musician in his brother Uday's troupe of "Hindu Dancers and Musicians," while his father taught at New York's Columbia University. Even in those early days, the family troupe earned the admiration of the great artists of the period, ranging from ballerina and choreographer Anna Pavlova to author James Joyce. In that period of extended living in Europe and the United States, Ravi Shankar and his family came to hear the constellation of musical stars of the day, like Jascha Heifetz, Arturo Toscanini, Pablo Casals, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway.
He first met his guru, the great sarod player Ustad Allauddin Khan, and Khan's son—later a renowned sarod artist in his own right, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan—in 1934. In 1938, Shankar ventured to the city of Maihar to study intensively with Allauddin Khan; he remained there for seven rigorous years, during which period he also married his first wife, fellow sitarist Annapurna, who was also Allauddin Khan's daughter.
By 1947, Shankar was recording for HMV India, and within a couple of years he had also joined the prestigious All-India Radio. In the 1950s, Shankar was wildly active as a touring artist (performing widely both within India and abroad) and as a composer, including writing the music for some of director Satyajit Ray's most revered films, including the Apu trilogy. The 1960s saw Shankar become an icon in Europe and America, thanks to such memorable appearances as his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Shankar was increasingly interested in writing music that bridged the European and Indian classical music traditions, such as his West Meets East recordings with violinist Yehudi Menuhin that began in 1967, and his Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra No. 1, premiered in London in 1971.
His popularity continued to flourish through the 1980s and 1990s; while Shankar still tours regularly, his efforts in recent years have been centered on nurturing the career of his daughter and protégée, Anoushka Shankar. (Another daughter, Norah Jones, is a popular folk-country-jazz singer.)
While many of his best recordings from his early years aren't currently available internationally, the blazing pyrotechnics of a jugalbandi duet recital Ravi Shankar & Ali Akbar Khan in Concert, 1972 (EMI) is worth seeking out. For those looking for an excellent general primer on North Indian classical music, Shankar made a guided tour of the basics of melody and rhythm, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records in the early 1970s, which has been available on CD. For a wide sampling of Shankar's career, try the four-CD set Ravi Shankar: In Celebration (Angel). —Anastasia Tsioulcas