© Ravi Shankar / AP
Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar dies at
92
By MUNEEZA NAQVI , Associated Press
NEW DELHI (AP) -- With an instrument perplexing to most Westerners, Ravi
Shankar helped connect the world through music. The sitar virtuoso hobnobbed
with the Beatles, became a hippie musical icon and spearheaded the first rock
benefit concert as he introduced traditional Indian ragas to Western audiences
over nearly a century.
From George Harrison to John Coltrane, from Yehudi Menuhin to David Crosby,
his connections reflected music's universality, though a gap persisted between
Shankar and many Western fans. Sometimes they mistook tuning for tunes, while he
stood aghast at displays like Jimi Hendrix's burning guitar.
Shankar died Tuesday at age 92. A statement on his website said he died in
San Diego, near his Southern California home with his wife and a daughter by his
side. The musician's foundation issued a statement saying that he had suffered
upper respiratory and heart problems and had undergone heart-valve replacement
surgery last week.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also confirmed Shankar's death and
called him a "national treasure."
Labeled "the godfather of world music" by Harrison, Shankar helped millions
of classical, jazz and rock lovers discover the centuries-old traditions of
Indian music.
"He was legend of legends," Shivkumar Sharma, a noted santoor player who
performed with Shankar, told Indian media. "Indian classical was not at all
known in the Western world. He was the musician who had that training ... the
ability to communicate with the Western audience."
He also pioneered the concept of the rock benefit with the 1971 Concert For
Bangladesh. To later generations, he was known as the estranged father of
popular American singer Norah Jones.
His last musical performance was with his other daughter, sitarist Anoushka
Shankar Wright, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach, California; his foundation said it was
to celebrate his 10th decade of creating music. The multiple Grammy winner
learned that he had again been nominated for the award the night before his
surgery.
"It's one of the biggest losses for the music world," said Kartic Seshadri, a
Shankar protege, sitar virtuoso and music professor at the University of
California, San Diego. "There's nothing more to be said."
As early as the 1950s, Shankar began collaborating with and teaching some of
the greats of Western music, including violinist Menuhin and jazz saxophonist
Coltrane. He played well-received shows in concert halls in Europe and the
United States, but faced a constant struggle to bridge the musical gap between
the West and the East.
Describing an early Shankar tour in 1957, Time magazine said. "U.S. audiences
were receptive but occasionally puzzled."
His close relationship with Harrison, the Beatles lead guitarist, shot
Shankar to global stardom in the 1960s.
Harrison had grown fascinated with the sitar, a long-necked string instrument
that uses a bulbous gourd for its resonating chamber and resembles a giant lute.
He played the instrument, with a Western tuning, on the song "Norwegian Wood,"
but soon sought out Shankar, already a musical icon in India, to teach him to
play it properly.
The pair spent weeks together, starting the lessons at Harrison's house in
England and then moving to a houseboat in Kashmir and later to California.
Gaining confidence with the complex instrument, Harrison recorded the
Indian-inspired song "Within You Without You" on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band," helping spark the raga-rock phase of 60s music and
drawing increasing attention to Shankar and his work.
Shankar's popularity exploded, and he soon found himself playing on bills
with some of the top rock musicians of the era. He played a four-hour set at the
Monterey Pop Festival and the opening day of Woodstock.
Though the audience for his music had hugely expanded, Shankar, a serious,
disciplined traditionalist who had played Carnegie Hall, chafed against the drug
use and rebelliousness of the hippie culture.
"I was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all stoned.
To me, it was a new world," Shankar told Rolling Stone of the Monterey
festival.
While he enjoyed Otis Redding and the Mamas and the Papas at the festival, he
was horrified when Hendrix lit his guitar on fire.
"That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical
instruments, they are like part of God," he said.
In 1971, moved by the plight of millions of refugees fleeing into India to
escape the war in Bangladesh, Shankar reached out to Harrison to see what they
could do to help.
In what Shankar later described as "one of the most moving and intense
musical experiences of the century," the pair organized two benefit concerts at
Madison Square Garden that included Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr.
The concert, which spawned an album and a film, raised millions of dollars
for UNICEF and inspired other rock benefits, including the 1985 Live Aid concert
to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia and the 2010 Hope For Haiti Now
telethon.
Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury was born April 7, 1920, in the Indian city of
Varanasi.
At the age of 10, he moved to Paris to join the world famous dance troupe of
his brother Uday. Over the next eight years, Shankar traveled with the troupe
across Europe, America and Asia, and later credited his early immersion in
foreign cultures with making him such an effective ambassador for Indian
music.
During one tour, renowned musician Baba Allaudin Khan joined the troupe, took
Shankar under his wing and eventually became his teacher through 7 1/2 years of
isolated, rigorous study of the sitar.
"Khan told me you have to leave everything else and do one thing properly,"
Shankar told The Associated Press.
In the 1950s, Shankar began gaining fame throughout India. He held the
influential position of music director for All India Radio in New Delhi and
wrote the scores for several popular films. He began writing compositions for
orchestras, blending clarinets and other foreign instruments into traditional
Indian music.
And he became a de facto tutor for Westerners fascinated by India's musical
traditions.
He gave lessons to Coltrane, who named his son Ravi in Shankar's honor, and
became close friends with Menuhin, recording the acclaimed "West Meets East"
album with him. He also collaborated with flutist Jean Pierre Rampal, composer
Philip Glass and conductors Andre Previn and Zubin Mehta.
"Any player on any instrument with any ears would be deeply moved by Ravi
Shankar. If you love music, it would be impossible not to be," singer Crosby,
whose band The Byrds was inspired by Shankar's music, said in the book "The Dawn
of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi."
Shankar's personal life, however, was more complex.
His 1941 marriage to Baba Allaudin Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, ended in
divorce. 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, who played the tanpura at his concerts, gave birth
to his daughter Anoushka.
He grew estranged from Sue Jones in the 80s and didn't see Norah for a
decade, though they later re-established contact.
He married Rajan in 1989 and trained young Anoushka as his heir on the sitar.
In recent years, father and daughter toured the world together.
The statement she and her mother released said, "Although it is a time for
sorrow and sadness, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks and to be
grateful that we were able to have him as part of our lives."
When Jones shot to stardom and won five Grammy awards in 2003, Anoushka
Shankar was nominated for a Grammy of her own.
Shankar himself won three Grammy awards and was nominated for an Oscar for
his musical score for the movie "Gandhi." His album "The Living Room Sessions,
Part 1" earned him his latest Grammy nomination, for best world music album.
Despite his fame, numerous albums and decades of world tours, Shankar's music
remained a riddle to many Western ears.
Shankar was amused after he and colleague Ustad Ali Akbar Khan were greeted
with admiring applause when they opened the Concert for Bangladesh by twanging
their sitar and sarod for a minute and a half.
"If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more," he
told the confused crowd, and then launched into his set.
The fiscal cliff dilemma is prompting some novel ideas on how to
reduce the federal deficit -- including the highly questionable suggestion of
turning Uncle Sam into a pimp.
As
a result, Ronnie Wood is more important to the Stones than he ever has been. The
guy is never going to be the world's greatest guitar player, but his versatility
his ability to shift from rhythm to lead, play slide or even lap steel — picks
up the slack now left by Richards' limitations. Keith's vocal spotlight,
back-to-back performances of "Before They Make Me Run" and "Happy" with
impressively strong singing, both turned into showcases for Wood's fretwork.
