Ravi Shankar's daughter, Norah Jones' half-sister, plays the sitar, but the music she creates is her own. Her latest release bridges several genres.
By RYAN PEARSON, Associated Press
Published October 9, 2005
LOS ANGELES - Strumming a sitar was "tantamount to homework" for Anoushka Shankar when she was a preteen under the tutelage of her outsized musical legend of a father, Ravi Shankar. She found it boring and full of pressure and expectations. Then she shimmied up the learning curve so fast she was performing concerts by the age of 13.
At 24, she has internalized one of her 85-year-old father's biggest obsessions: Introducing the sounds of India to Western audiences - and to Western music. Her new CD Rise is nine songs of djembes, bansuris and duduks - alongside subtle, shifting electro and ambient beats from Gaurav Raina of Indian group MIDIval PunditZ. Shankar, who splits time between homes in San Diego and New Delhi, spoke about her genre-expanding album and the failed collaboration with her half-sister, a once-struggling jazz crooner named Norah Jones:
You're making a musical transition from Indian classical to this massive lump of a category we call world music. How does this album fit in to that broad label?
I sort of resist definition. I wouldn't know what to call it. You could say it's predominantly Indian music. But it's not just that. You could say it's Indo-electronica but it's not that at all. You could say it's Indian with flamenco piano and didgeridoo and electronic, but that sounds a little scary. The words "world music" fit, because that's what it is. . . . People are looking for something new, something more. It's just reached that point where people are sick of hearing world music casually, in the scene of samples, or a world music concert where everybody gets 10 minutes: "Here's Japan, here's India." People just seem to want to go a little deeper now.
Did you set out to break away from Indian music with this CD?
A friend had a studio (in Santa Monica, Calif.) free for a couple months and just offered it to me. It was just literally having fun, playing around with a lot of ideas. I definitely approached it knowing it was going be different from anything I had done before. I thought I would have gone further toward the electronica. In my actual composing, I surprised myself, even though it may make sense. That Indian format is a real intrinsic part of who I am. So even though I'm sitting without any rules or regulations, my brain was trained to the raag format. Even though we would use other flavors, it is mainly Indian.
Have you ever collaborated with your half-sister Norah Jones?
We definitely do talk about it. We tried a couple times, with much failure. We were sitting there in India a few years ago, and we tried very casually. We haven't really come up with anything worth hearing. I even thought about having her on this album. But it wasn't really happening. I wasn't coming up with anything.
A few years ago, your father said he wanted to compose a piece for you and Norah to perform together.
(Laughs) Right. That became a really big deal after that. Everybody was asking "When is it going to happen?" We both got kind of a little put off by that. We're going down very different paths. We're both having fun doing what we do. That's about all that's similar, really.
And after this album, back to your roots?
Part of me wants to at least get a classical sitar record out in India and have that presence still felt. I don't want it to be like I've moved away. In a musical sense, people feel like maybe I've moved into this: "Now you're a fusion artist" quote-unquote. But I'm also just a sitar player. Well, not just. But I'm a sitar player and that's an important part of who I am.
