Shankar became the world's foremost ambassador of Indian music and culture, but he couldn't be all things to all people. Well, yes - but as for so many others, I was lucky enough to have experienced his music as a portal into this whole other world. He was a warm and gracious presence, and seemed intrigued by how I had stumbled into Indian classical music. Back then, I couldn't possibly have foreseen having had the chance of working with him for a short time about a decade later, when I was asked to put together a retrospective compilation of some of his most notable experimental work. Twenty years ago, when I first fell entirely accidentally into the world of South Asian music - which then became a long-standing passion of mine - the only Indian musician's name I knew was his. Moreover, lots of folks around the world won't know other Indian instruments like a bansuri flute or a sarod or a sarangi, but they can instantly identify the sitar's sound - and that's entirely thanks to Ravi Shankar.
(As I write this, I have sitting next to me Shankar's 1968 book My Music, My Life, which boasts a "complete" manual for the mechanics of playing the sitar and introduction to raga theory that is all of 55 pages long.) (Shankar had a complicated personal life that is touched upon glancingly in his autobiography Raga Mala, published in 1997 when he turned 75.)īut his influence comes through in more surprising places as well, from the name that fan and onetime Shankar student John Coltrane gave his son, to the way that the sound of the sitar seeped into who knows how many pop productions in the decades that followed and Shankar's first encounter with George Harrison in 1966. There's his daughter and sitar protegee Anoushka Shankar, who's followed in her father's fusion footsteps, as well as his daughter Norah Jones, who grew up without her father in a relationship only publicly acknowledged when Jones was on the brink of adulthood. In certain circles, the echoes of the late sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar's talent are everywhere - and not just in the places you might expect. The late sitarist, composer and musical ambassador Ravi Shankar, who died Tuesday at age 92.
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