“As you can imagine, I put a few versions together,” Shankar, a six-time Grammy nominee, says by phone from her home in London.
“Usually,
I really only look at any one particular album at a time when I’m
making it. I’ve never really sat and looked at the journey through all
of my albums to see if I could find a thread through them. It was
difficult because, obviously, you could make very different stories and
moods in a compilation.”
She
made one, she says, that was mellow and meditative, then another that
was upbeat and energetic. “Finally, I just tried to find the right
balance,” she says.
That
balance required that she pay attention to the various aspects of her
career: the intricate, improvisatory Indian classical music taught to
her by her father, world-renowned sitar player and composer Ravi
Shankar; cross-cultural experiments, including journeys into electronica
and flamenco music; and collaborations with vocalists, including her
half-sister Norah Jones.
Shankar
started playing sitar at age 7 — “My parents had a small one made for
me. It was still quite intimidating.” She made her recording debut at 13
and at 15 appeared on her father’s album “Chants of India,” which was
produced by George Harrison. Her debut album under her own name,
“Anoushka,” appeared in 1998, when she was 17.
Being
the daughter of Ravi Shankar certainly opened doors for her, but it
took her own talent and determination to become more than just an echo
of her father’s legacy.
“My
father was a pioneer and a leader in the things he did and the way he
did them,” she says. “But it’s not just that he was the pure classicist
and I’m not, you know? He was a great innovator and experimenter. But if
I were to follow exactly the way he did it, I wouldn’t be finding
anything new to say.”
It didn’t
hurt that, as she grew up in London, Delhi and Los Angeles, Shankar was
a bit of a rave kid. Electronic instruments and dance rhythms began to
make their way into her sound as early as her 2005 album “Rise,” which
she produced herself.
“From
there it kind of plays across different albums,” she says. “For me, it
felt like, growing up, I had this very sort of intense experience with
Indian classical music and learning and performing it. To be a traveler
in that wild, psychedelic world of dance music felt like the complete
polar opposite. But there were a lot of similarities in what I was
getting out of both kinds of music. So that set me up to have a really
broad range and to have an open mind about music.”
Being taught by her father, she
admits, was an occasionally intense experience. She didn’t always know
that she wanted to follow in his footsteps, but even during periods of
doubt, she continued to practice.
“I
lived with my teacher and he was my father and he practiced every day
so I practiced every day and we practiced every day together,” she says.
She
recalls an interview that George Harrison gave in which he talked about
being a student of Ravi Shankar and about how strict and demanding a
teacher he was. And then he mentioned Anoushka.
“He
said, ‘Yeah, I really feel sorry for her because she can’t escape
him!’” she says with a laugh. “That sums up the beauty and the intensity
at the same time.”
Despite the
popularity of her father’s work, Westerners regard the sitar as an
exotic instrument, and it’s still not widely heard. Shankar is helping
to break down those barriers, but it’s a work in progress.
“What is amazing about the sitar can also end up being difficult for it,” she says.
“Even
though my father had a really successful career before the ’60s, that
kind of insane pop-culture splash that happened was so massive. People
hear the sitar and immediately think, you know, flying carpets and
tie-dyed T-shirts and wafting smoke.
“One
of the things I’m trying to do is still respect the instrument and its
culture but also kind of demystify it — not play it in a context that is
just instrumental and exotic, you know? That feels important to me.”