[Ravi Shankar, whose
formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in
Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His older brother Uday
directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10.
Within five years he had become one of the company’s star soloists. He also
discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another
stringed instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.]
By Allan Kozinn
 |
Donal F. Holway/The New York Times
Ravi Shankar, center, played during the Concert for Bangladesh in
Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1971.
|
Ravi
Shankar, the Indian sitarist and
composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock
stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died
Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.
Mr. Shankar had suffered
from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent
heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.
Mr. Shankar, a
soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that
transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical
traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds
and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United
States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large
following for Indian music.
His instrument, the
sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the
top. It has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played
but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are
partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory
of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons
of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back
several millenniums.
Mr. Shankar’s quest for
a Western audience was helped in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles began
to study the sitar with him. But Harrison was not the first Western musician to
seek Mr. Shankar’s guidance. In 1952 he met and began performing with the
violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: “West
Meets East” (1967), “West Meets East, Vol. 2” (1968) and “Improvisations: East
Meets West” (1977).
Mr. Shankar loved to mix
the music of different cultures. He collaborated with the flutist Jean-Pierre
Rampal and the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, who had become
fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in the early ’60s. Coltrane met
with Mr. Shankar several times from 1964 to 1966 to learn the basics of ragas,
talas and Indian improvisation techniques. Coltrane named his son Ravi after
Mr. Shankar.
Mr. Shankar also
collaborated with several prominent Japanese musicians — Hozan Yamamoto, a
shakuhachi player, and Susumu Miyashita, a koto player — on “East Greets East,”
a 1978 recording in which Indian and Japanese influences intermingled.
In addition to his
frequent tours as a sitarist Mr. Shankar was a prolific composer of film music
(including the score for Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” in 1982), ballets,
electronic works and concertos for sitar and Western orchestras.
In 1988 his
seven-movement “Swar Milan” was performed at the Palace of Culture in Moscow by
an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble, members of
the Moscow Philharmonic and the Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Mr.
Shankar’s own group of Indian musicians. And in 1990 he collaborated with the
Minimalist composer Philip Glass — who had worked as his assistant on the film
score for “Chappaqua” in the late 1960s — on “Passages,” a recording of works
he and Mr. Glass composed for each other.
“I have always had an
instinct for doing new things,” Mr. Shankar said in 1985. “Call it good or bad,
I love to experiment.”
Ravi Shankar, whose
formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in
Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His older brother Uday
directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10.
Within five years he had become one of the company’s star soloists. He also
discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another
stringed instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.
The idea of helping
Western listeners appreciate the intricacies of Indian music occurred to him during
his years as a dancer.
“My brother had a house
in Paris,” he recalled in one interview. “To it came many Western classical
musicians. These musicians all made the same point: ‘Indian music,’ they said,
‘is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own it is repetitious
and monotonous.’ They talked as if Indian music were an ethnic phenomenon, just
another museum piece. Even when they were being decent and kind, I was furious.
And at the same time sorry for them. Indian music was so rich and varied and
deep. These people hadn’t penetrated even the outer skin.”
Mr. Shankar soon found,
however, that as a young, self-taught musician he had not penetrated very
deeply either. In 1936 an Indian court musician, Allaudin Khan, joined the
company for a year and set Mr. Shankar on a different path.
“He was the first person
frank enough to tell me that I had talent but that I was wasting it — that I
was going nowhere, doing nothing,” Mr. Shankar said. “Everyone else was full of
praise, but he killed my ego and made me humble.”
When Mr. Shankar asked
Mr. Khan to teach him, he was told that he could learn to play the sitar only
after he decided to give up the worldly life he was leading and devote himself
fully to his studies. In 1937 Mr. Shankar gave up dancing, sold his Western
clothes and returned to India to become a musician.
“I surrendered myself to
the old way,” he said, “and let me tell you, it was difficult for me to go from
places like New York and Chicago to a remote village full of mosquitoes, bedbugs,
lizards and snakes, with frogs croaking all night. I was just like a Western
young man. But I overcame all that.”
After studying with Mr.
Khan for seven years and marrying his daughter, Annapurna, also a sitarist, Mr.
Shankar began his performing career in India. In the 1940s he started bringing
Eastern and Western currents together in ballet scores and incidental music for
films, including Satyajit Ray’s “Apu” trilogy, in the late 1950s. In 1949 he
was appointed music director of All India Radio. There he formed the National
Orchestra, an ensemble of both Indian and Western classical instruments.
Mr. Shankar became
increasingly interested in touring outside India in the early 1950s. His
appetite was whetted further when he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union in
1954 and was invited to perform in London and New York. But it wasn’t until
1956 that he began spending long periods outside India. That year, he left his
position at All India Radio and undertook tours of Europe and the United
States.
Through his recitals, as
well as recordings on the Columbia and World Pacific labels, Mr. Shankar built
a Western following for the sitar. Interest in the instrument exploded in 1965,
when Harrison encountered a sitar on the set of “Help!,” the Beatles’ second
film. Intrigued by the instrument’s complexity, he learned its rudiments and
used it on a Beatles recording, “Norwegian Wood,” that year.
The Rolling Stones, the
Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups quickly followed suit, although few
went as far as Harrison, who recorded several songs that appeared on Beatles
albums with Indian musicians, rather than his band mates. By the summer of 1967
the sitar was in vogue in the rock world.
At first Mr. Shankar
reveled in the attention his connection with popular culture brought him, and
he performed for huge audiences at the Monterey International Pop Festival in
1967 and at Woodstock in 1969. He also performed, with the tabla virtuoso Alla
Rakha and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, at an all-star concert at Madison Square
Garden in 1971 that Harrison organized to help Mr. Shankar raise money for the
victims of political upheaval in Bangladesh.
Mr. Shankar eventually
came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake. Looking back
at that era, he said he deplored the use of his music, which has its roots in
an ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug taking.
“On one hand,” he said
in a 1985 interview, “I was lucky to have been there at a time when society was
changing. And although much of the hippie movement seemed superficial, there
was also a lot of sincerity in it, and a tremendous amount of energy. What
disturbed me, though, was the use of drugs and the mixing of drugs with our
music. And I was hurt by the idea that our classical music was treated as a fad
— something that is very common in Western countries.
“People would come to my
concerts stoned, and they would sit in the audience drinking Coke and making
out with their girlfriends. I found it very humiliating, and there were many
times I picked up my sitar and walked away.
“I tried to make the
young people sit properly and listen. I assured them that if they wanted to be
high, I could make them feel high through the music, without drugs, if they’d
only give me a chance. It was a terrible experience at the time.
“But you know, many of
those young people still come to our concerts. They have matured, they are free
from drugs, and they have a better attitude. And this makes me happy that I
went through all that. I have come full circle.”
He maintained his
friendship and working relationship with Harrison, who released a recording of
a 1972 performance by Mr. Shankar on the Beatles’ Apple label and produced a
recording in a more popular style — short, bright-edged songs with vocals,
rather than expansive instrumental improvisations — by Shankar Family and Friends
(who included Harrison, listed in the credits as Hari Georgeson, as well as the
bassist Klaus Voorman, the pianist Nicky Hopkins, the organist Billy Preston
and the flutist Tom Scott) on his own Dark Horse label in 1974. That year, Mr.
Shankar toured the United States with Harrison. They last worked together in
1997, when Harrison produced Mr. Shankar’s “Chants of India” CD for EMI.
Mr. Shankar continued to
be regarded in the West as the most eloquent spokesman for his country’s music.
But his popularity abroad and his experiments with Western musical sounds and
styles drew criticism among traditionalists in India.
“In India I have been
called a destroyer,” he said in 1981. “But that is only because they mixed my
identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried
everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am,
believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the
heritage that I have learned.”
Mr. Shankar was a member
of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, from 1986 to
1992.
He taught extensively in
the United States. In the late 1960s he founded a school of Indian music, the
Kinnara School, in Los Angeles. He was a visiting professor at City College in
New York in 1967. Recordings of his City College lectures were the basis for
“Learning Indian Music,” a set of cassettes that explain the basics of the
style. Mr. Shankar was the subject of a documentary film, “Raga: A Journey Into
the Soul of India,” in 1971, and published two autobiographies: “My Life, My
Music” in 1969 and “Raga Mala” in 1997.
In 2010 the Ravi Shankar
Foundation started a record label using a variation of the name of his
collaboration with Menuhin, East Meets West Music, which began by reissuing some
of his historic recordings and films, including “Raga.” Mr. Shankar’s first
marriage, to Annapurna Devi, ended in the late 1960s. They had a son,
Shubhendra Shankar, who died in 1992. He also had long relationships with
Kamala Shastri, a dancer; and Sue Jones, a concert producer, with whom he had a
daughter, the singer Norah Jones, in 1979; as well as Sukanya Rajan, whom he
married in 1989. Mr. Shankar and Ms. Rajan had a daughter, the sitar virtuoso
Anoushka Shankar, in 1981. He is survived by his wife and two daughters as well
as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
“If I’ve accomplished
anything in these past 30 years,” Mr. Shankar said in the 1985 interview, “it’s
that I have been able to open the door to our music in the West. I enjoy seeing
other Indian musicians — old and young — coming to Europe and America and
having some success. I’m happy to have contributed to that.
“Of course now there is
a whole new generation out there, so we have to start all over again. To a
degree their interest in India has been kindled by ‘Gandhi,’ ‘Passage to India’
and ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ What we have to do now is convey to them an
awareness of the richness and diversity of our culture.”
