Monday, April 1, 2013
The Indian sitar master who profoundly influenced the work of the Beatles, John Coltrane, and the Byrd—and, by extension, a large swath of modern music—died Tuesday, December 11 at age 92. !!
Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar master who profoundly influenced the
work of the Beatles, John Coltrane, and the Byrds—and, by extension, a
large swath of modern music—died Tuesday, December 11 at age 92.
Shankar was born in Varanasi, India, in 1920, and became involved with
Indian classical music and dance at a very early age, working with his
brother’s dance troupe when he was just 5 years old. He took to the
sitar very young, displaying a rare natural affinity and skill for the
instrument, as well as other Indian classical instruments such as the
tabla and sarod. His autodidactic approach made him adept enough to
become a professional, and he first toured Europe in the 1930s. By the
middle of that decade, however, he’d been persuaded by master Indian
classical musician Allauddin Khan to study the sitar formally. By the
time he emerged from his formal training several years later, he was a
master.
Shankar’s uncommon skill as a sitarist and composer made him a fixture
in Indian theater and ballet, as well as Indian radio and the country’s
nascent recording industry. And the breadth of experience, charisma, and
undoubtedly his early experiences in Europe made him a natural, if
sometimes reluctant, cultural ambassador for India. By the 1950s, he had
begun to record ragas for American labels—most importantly Richard
Bock’s World Pacific Records.
The association with World Pacific would prove incredibly important to
Shankar’s rise to wider world popularity. World Pacific’s titles were
enthusiastically digested by American music cognoscenti—from jazz
heavies like Miles Davis and John Coltrane (who visited Shankar to study
ragas as early as 1964) to budding folk, pop, and rock musicians—not
the least being a pair of aspiring, Beatle-crazed folk musicians by the
name of David Crosby and Jim McGuinn. While rising interest in Indian
philosophy and culture had already made Indian classical musical more
common in English and American intellectual circles, it was arguably
David Crosby who sparked the explosion of interest in Shankar’s work
among the pop elite. He discussed Shankar’s work at length with George
Harrison when the Byrds and Beatles mingled in Los Angeles in the summer
of 1965. And though it wasn’t released until 1966, the Byrds “Eight
Miles High”—the first and perhaps definitive article of raga rock—was
composed during a 1965 tour in which the Byrds ceaselessly played a
cassette containing Shankar’s ragas and Coltrane’s Africa/Brass.
Within two years, echoes of Shankar’s influence were audible in work
ranging from pop and rock giants like the Rolling Stones, Donovan, and
the Beatles to avant and popular jazz figures from Pharoah Sanders to
Gábor Szabó.
The rock underground then paid tribute and gave thanks to Shankar with
an invitation to the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Shankar’s
performance there became the finale in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of
the same name. In the performance of “Dhun (Dadra and Fast Teental),”
the camera captures not only an ecstatic and mesmerized crowd, but a
positively enraptured Jimi Hendrix and Michael Bloomfield digging
Shankar in a priceless testament to the emotional power of his music and
his profound influence on some of the electric guitar’s mightiest and
most visionary vanguards.
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