London-based sitar player Anoushka Shankar began performing in public when she was 13, almost 30 years ago, and was soon playing such major venues as the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. In those appearances, she usually accompanied her father, Ravi Shankar, the world’s leading sitarist until his death in 2012.
Anoushka Shankar keeps pushing the boundaries of sitar music – The Washington Post
October 4, 2023
Shankar is taking a quick break from a London studio where she’s mixing the second in a planned trilogy of EPs, “Forever, For Now.” The first installment was just released and will provide some of the material for her Oct. 6 concert at Strathmore Music Center.
“I wanted to make something that felt deeply peaceful and could achieve the sort of intimacy and space in the music that I found myself listening to over the last several years,” the sitarist says of the series. To get the effect she desired, she enlisted two musicians she associates with spacious music: German multi-instrumentalist Nils Frahm (who plays piano on one track) and Pakistani American singer-producer Arooj Aftab.
On this tour, “I’m playing a few of the new pieces, as usual not exact replicas, but adapting for the stage,” Shankar explains. “Which I find more entertaining, for myself anyway. And then also playing improvised or expanded versions of previous songs of mine.”
Although her style is rooted in Indian music, Shankar studied classical piano as a teenager and has long incorporated elements of other traditions. She has also collaborated with pop musicians, including her half sister, Norah Jones. This eclecticism is reflected in the ensemble that will join her at Strathmore: clarinetist Arun Ghosh, drummer Sarathy Korwar, percussionist Pirashanna Thevarajah and stand-up bassist Tom Farmer.
“The band is new, and I find them so inspiring that it’s really changed the sound of everything we’re playing,” Shankar says. “So even though we’re playing a mix of new and old music, the whole thing feels really fresh.”
With groups that attempt crossover music, the sitarist observes, the results “can, ironically, become more limited, because we have to create these safety nets for everyone playing in different styles from each other.”
But this is the “most freeing band I’ve had in a while,” she says. “I feel like they can travel with me wherever I want to go. It’s really fun.”
The most unusual aspect of Shankar’s current group is the bass, which plays a role that doesn’t exist in Indian classical music. It was while working on fusions of Indian and electronic modes that the sitarist “started getting used to what that sounded like, having that low end.”
Around the time of her 2016 album, “Land of Gold,” Shankar “started working with upright bass and just fell in love with it. It was bringing this new whole aspect in tonality out of my own instrument to play against the bass.”
Farmer’s bass is prominent in a song Shankar released in December 2022, “In Her Name,” which is anything but peaceful. The primarily instrumental piece, which includes a spoken-word section, marked the 10th anniversary of the 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi.
“I needed it to feel very strong and dynamic,” the sitarist says of the track. “With strong percussion and strong bass because of the context of the song written in tribute to Jyoti Singh Pandey — and all the women who have come since. I was marking the 10-year anniversary of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s passing — of her attack, actually — and yet railing that nothing seems to have changed in the 10 years since what happened to her.”
Oct. 6 at 8 p.m. at Strathmore Music Center, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. strathmore.org. $78.
Source: News
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