Heir Sitar

Anoushka Shankar still plays with her pop (but hasn't gone pop).

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Oct 14, 2008

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Pop culture will tell you that being a child of the famous isn't easy, but Anoushka Shankar has a different story. She makes life with father sound dreamy.

"As a musician and as a man, I learn so much from him, you know," says the 27-year-old sitarist, singer and keyboardist. "He's so in the moment. He keeps on coming up with new ideas and is so sweetly dedicated to his music. For someone at that level to stay at the top of his game for so long is amazing."

Ravi Shankar, 88, is an icon — the icon — of Indian classical music. He's been the master practitioner of the sitar since his first recording in 1956, Three Ragas, brought the Hindustani sound to a broader public. Since that time, Ravi Shankar has transformed his instrument and his music by steering both into jazz and psychedelic pop realms. But no matter how far out his music's traveled, Ravi Shankar is most known for being the keeper of the flame.

Since the age of 9, Anoushka has been playing classical Indian music live while studying with its master, her pop. Starting at age 13, Anoushka has been accompanying her father onstage as his opening act and as a partner/participant in his set. "When I'm onstage with him, we're still master and student," says Anoushka of her strict teacher and his expectations. "He's a perfectionist who, the older he gets, puts me through more rigorous studies. But really, it's about him providing tools for you to be the artist you want and need be."

That's part of why Anoushka's aesthetic development is so formidable. After making records that followed the tradition (her first, 1998's Anoushka, when she was 17, with Anourag and Live at Carnegie Hall soon after) Anoushka has spent the last three years slow-brewing her own heady concoctions — the moody fusion anthems of 2005's Rise, the vividly experimental electronic loops-and-breaks of Breathing Under Water with keyboardist Karsh Kale in 2007.

"I won't say that I'm exactly where I want to be, but I'm mostly pleased with my development," she says. "I like that my music spans a couple of genres and a couple of audiences." How she's marketed to these audiences — she, a performer who eschewed the mid-'90s trend of Hindu-tronic acts and sounds from Soup Dragons to Cornershop to pursue Indian classical music? That's another story.

"How I'm presented ... that's a little trickier since I have to reach a classical audience more often than I do a pop one. I would hate to alienate my classical audience by being marketed too much as a new age electronica blah blah blah, because that's not what I am."

No. No one wants to be known as a new age electronica blah blah blah. "For sure," she laughs.

Anoushka has tried to bring Indian classical music into this other niche she attempted to create for herself. "That's how I've been comfortable sliding through each of those musics," she says. It wasn't as hard as one would imagine — going from Indian classical into the passionate expressionism of Rise and Breathing Under Water.

"Things were set up, unintentionally perhaps, for me to step out of the pure classical framework. I've had a very international life, certainly more so than most Indian classical musicians. I've lived on several continents. I learned from the master, but not in the most conventional way as I grew up in part in California with different lifestyles, languages and cultures available to me." The legacy was in place — the idea that she'd follow in father's footsteps. But she bided her time.

"When I was a teenager in the '90s, there was that time period where Vanessa Mae popped up on the international circuit and there was all that Indian electronic stuff happening. When that fusion thing became a big deal and people suggested to me, 'Hey, wouldn't that be great if ... ' I really dug my heels in because it didn't feel right to me or real to me."

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Learning to compose her own material became the key to delving into sounds and influences beyond the classical. She was the tradition. Breaking through that to make what she calls "the baby steps" of Rise and the "fun experiment" of Breathing Under Water became also about sewing her oats and hanging out with pals like Kale and their mutual musician buddies between New Delhi and New York City. "I just wanted to play a lot — with an orchestra, with a group," says Shankar of the 2007 Breathing period. "As a band late at night, the instruments would come out and we'd get silly and jam like any other garage act."

Still, it's through the physical and spiritual nature of the sitar and Indian classical music — an improvised program her father will decide before showtime when the two play this evening — that Anoushka Shankar has made her boldest breakthroughs and found her deepest love. The sheer depth of it, the way it would move her, the meditation to be found within the music? "I got that quite quickly — in my teenage years. I was able to reach that with my father. That was magical. But I couldn't improvise like I do now or have that power at my command. When it finally happened, it was beautiful, that loss of control. It wasn't until I learned to live in the moment that I truly began."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Ravi Shankar and Anoushka Shankar play Sun., Oct. 19, 7:30 p.m., $34-$65, Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad St., 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org.

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