Live at the Sheldon 2019-03-14
Anoushka Shankar’s lifelong journey with the sitar
The first time Anoushka Shankar held a sitar in her hands proved to be a meaningful — albeit brief — moment in her life’s journey.
“My first memory of picking up the instrument and playing is funny really. I was 7, and the sitar my parents had made for me was delivered to our house. I picked it up and was shown a few notes,” Shankar recalls. “It didn’t provoke too much for me at first. I was more interested in playing in the garden.”
In the 30 years that have since passed, Shankar has found the sitar a vessel to share her dreams, passions and personality with audiences the world over. She’s touring across North America this spring to celebrate the release of “Reflections,” a career-spanning compilation covering two decades, released by Deutsche Grammophon on March 8. Shankar will visit the Phillips Center for Performing Arts on at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25-$45, or $10 with UFID.
Shankar is the daughter of the late Ravi Shankar, who brought Hindustani classical music to Western ears in the 1960s with a performance at Woodstock and through his mentorship of George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar studied under her father from age 9 and gave her first public performance at 13 in New Delhi as part of her father’s 75th birthday celebration concert. She says though her father’s influence is omnipresent in her work, she has crafted her own voice with the instrument.
“I learned from my father from the very beginning of my playing. His influence is present in every aspect of my musicianship, from technique to style and phrasing and even down to the arrangements in my compositions,” she says. “The process of finding my own style and way happened in my 20s when I started to compose and improvise more. My voice is an intersection of my technique and my personality coming through. More than deliberately letting go of my father’s influence, it was a process of finding my own voice.”
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Shankar’s music, of which she’s released eight studio albums and five live albums and compilations, pays homage to the Indian classical genre while engaging in a cross-cultural dialogue through collaborations with artists like Norah Jones and German-Turkish singer-songwriter Alev Lenz. Her 2011 album “Traveller” explores the shared history between flamenco and Indian classical.
“When I work creatively I bring everything I have with me, which includes my classical training, but my work encompasses a broad scope of genres,” Shankar says. “It’s a mix of playing the ancient and traditional with the new and modern. I try to be respectful of tradition without being reverential in order to create something that modern listeners can connect with.”
The sitar player and composer has been recognized numerous times for her boundary-breaking style: Shankar has been nominated for six Grammy awards. She’s the first Indian woman and the youngest person to be nominated for a World Music Grammy, the first Indian person to perform at the Grammy Awards (in 2006), as well as the first woman to receive a British House of Commons Shield.
Shankar is accompanied on this tour by Ojas Adhiya, tabla; Pirashanna Thevarajah, mridangam; Ravichandra Kulur, flute; Danny Keane, cello and piano and Kenji Ota, tanpura. She says that when she performs live, she maintains a bond with her audiences while also allowing space to connect with herself internally. That’s when the best moments happen, she says. She hopes her performance will similarly invite her audiences to look inside themselves.
“When I play for audiences, I want them to have felt peaceful, that they’ve connected with themselves and are at peace with themselves,” she says. “I also want them to feel exhilarated, inspired and ecstatic, as music can do. If a show can do both for my audiences at different moments, then that’s amazing.”
