Ravi Shankar gets help from Beatle friend
By Adam Tanner
WASHINGTON, May 16, 1996 (Reuter) - Thirty years after Beatle
George Harrison journeyed to India seeking sitar lessons from Ravi
Shankar, the former pupil has become the Indian master's foremost
patron.
When Shankar, 76, returns to the recording studio this summer, Harrison
will be be looking over his shoulder as the album's producer, as he was
for a four-CD Shankar retrospective released earlier this year. The British
guitarist and songwriter will also edit and provide an introduction for a
book of memoirs by the man who has spent a lifetime popularising Indian
music around the the world.
The flurry of support from the most reclusive of the remaining Beatles is
again putting the limelight on Shankar, whose status as sitar raga king of
the 1960s counter-culture faded with the decade. "I was not very much in
circulation in the popular sense, but it seems that they got me back,"
Shankar told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"It is like the Beatles themselves, for instance. I think they are very much
in the picture now in the last year or year and a half. It does help in many
ways because people get more interested when they see George
Harrison's name being associated (with me)," he added.
Shankar was already a well-regarded master of the sitar -- a long-necked
instrument with seven strings echoed by 11 sympathetic strings under
the elevated frets -- when Harrison's 1966 pilgrimage to Bombay to
learn the exotic instrument made Shankar the world's best-known guru.
His star soared in the West and he performed at some of the decade's
most famous rock festivals including Woodstock in 1969 and the
Monterey Pop festival in 1967.
Shankar says he misses the mass adoration today but is glad he no
longer has to contend with the hippies who made sitar ragas -- India's
classical music -- the soundtrack of the 1960s drug culture. "I had to
make them understand that this music is a serious music, and you
know, you have to listen with respect, with the same attitude as you go
to listen to Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It's not a pop music that you
can, you know, have Coke and beer and make it out with your girlfriend
at the same time."
After the breakup of the Beatles, Harrison performed with Shankar at a
charity Concert for Bangladesh and the two toured together in 1974. But
the tour was poorly received and they curtailed their professional
collaborations, even as their friendship remained strong, Shankar said.
"He regards me as his father, I regard him as my son and I love him
and it is a very special relationship," he said. "We are the greatest of
friends and he has tremendous admiration for me which I can't
explain."
Shankar's 75th birthday last year rekindled their professional union
with "In Celebration", a four-CD retrospective and booklet chronicling
Shankar's mastery of the sitar and career as a composer who has
experimented with fusing Eastern and Western music. In July, Shankar
plans to travel to England where Harrison will produce his latest album,
which he said is based on Indian chants and is "very soothing, very
spiritual, very meditative."
After a career of public performances dating back to 1930, Shankar has
reduced the number of his concert performances after having twice
undergone heart surgery in recent years. He spends most of his year in
Encinitas, California, near San Diego, with his second wife Sukanya,
45, and teenage daughter Anoushka, who has become his leading sitar
student.
Still, he has no plans to retire and stop recording music because, he said,
new ideas are continuously flooding his immagination. "There's new
things, new ideas all the time in my head and I try to bring it out through,
you know, the medium of music. At times the mind goes farther and faster
and fingers sometimes ... don't follow but that is the whole excitement of
it: you know we try to catch up with our mind."
Although his lightning-speed playing on the sitar has dazzled audiences
for generations, Shankar said he still has not completely mastered the
instrument. "No, no, no, absolutely not," he said. "One lifetime is not
enough."
-yen and I saw Ravi his sitar master daughter play a few months back. She was amazing, and young too, early 20's. |
