The Brooklyn Rail

Anoushka Shankar’s music is about her struggles with her presence in and experience of this world. Beginning with Anoushka (Angel) recorded at age seventeen, most of her album covers are pictures of her; Anoushka with a mirror in hand, Anoushka in front of a large room, a painted portrait. Her sitar playing on “Lasya” from the album Traces of You (Deutsche Grammaphon) says this all. It begins rapidly, gracefully, slowing down at times, as if spiraling between action and deep feeling and the synthesis of the two. Lasya is a dance by the goddess Pavarti in Hindu mythology, a dance to life.

How lively can one be with a sitar in an age ripe with contestation, protest, post-modernity? A guitar plays rock, folk, funk, jazz, hip hop. A sitar? Classical Indian music, and, what, fusion? The intertwining of hearts, minds, and bodies is what the sitar is capable of, in any genre. As if the albums behind the portraits are meant to be both invitation and indication, Shankar’s music affects a listener as a way of stretching human life experience.

The titles of tracks from her most recent release Chapter I: Forever, For Now (LEITER): “Daydreaming,” “Stolen Moments,” “What Will We Remember,” and “Sleeping Flowers (Awaken Every Spring).” Lively in questioning, contestation, and both error and solution, in the video for “Daydreaming,” Shankar glides her hands through meadow rue flowers. A flower is awakened, affected and affecting.

Shankar is known around the world for fusion music that melds flamenco music and electronic music, and uses piano, accordion, and whatever else she would like to intertwine with her sitar playing. Fusion lands well with audiences as a sort of one world, one love, citizen-of-the-world culture in the face of a neoliberalism that has not budged since the end of Keynesian economics and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At its best fusion makes for rare art, combining depth of knowledge and skillful practice into new art. At its worst it is a sort of bland public “goodness,” not revealing an artist in question. Through her sitar playing, her choice of notes and intervals, coupled with the use of lyrics for some songs, Shankar lets us into intentions that are beyond mere public goodness.

Take “Bright Eyes” on the EP Love Letters (Mercury Classics): “Does she feel younger than me / as she’s lying in your bed / Do you call her bright eyes too?” Hypocrisy is questioned in the song, resentment and waste are the stuff of her sitar playing. “But most importantly / do you call her bright eyes too?” It is likely that he does also call her bright eyes. Shankar could have simply stated that such and such person is awful, repugnant. More than just fusing the world’s traditions, her sitar playing questions the world itself, the world she finds herself in, where things like this happen.

Flamenco and sitar are a strong combination, as are piano and sitar. It is not true, however, that by combining different traditions one gets any closer to a transcendental music, one that can reach music’s highest ideals. A musician or listener can be much more spiritually disappointed by a fusion than by a straight forward raga. Shankar goes back and forth between fusion and ragas, traditional messaging, and more personal texts with the same intensity. Her album Land of Gold (Deutsche Grammaphon) responds to humanitarian crisis, as did her father Ravi Shankar’s The Concert for Bangladesh, with George Harrison. “May your kind heart / find a land of gold.” on the title track plays the wish into emotional significance. Listen to her play “Guru: Raga Jogeshwari - Jod, Jhala” on Home (Deutsche Grammaphon), a classical raga, and it has the same emotionality as “Land of Gold.” The raga seems to reveal more of her, the precision in her playing, her mind at work with the instrument, never relenting on the idea that rules give shape and structure to music.

In “The Sun Won’t Set”, the words about her famous father, sung by her sister Norah Jones, and her playing also question the world in which she lives. Ravi, meaning the sun, “won’t set,” and “it’s always sunset in this place.” The depth, and the spirituality in her relationship to her father come across, as does a longing for “how it felt / beneath the early sun.” Both Jones and Shankar struggle with the gravity of, and poetry in, a never setting sun, one that never gives way. Her relationship with father has inspired many other compositions and performances, from “Monsoon” to “Pancham Se Gara,” and defines her early albums—until 2005’s Rise (Angel) where her individuality becomes the songs that the morning brings, and we begin to hear her heart’s seasons.

From there, the bands grew to be much more complex. What began as music played by tabla and sitar became the fusion of other instruments. Roussan Camille’s poem “Nedje” comes to mind listening to Shankar. That “your song / will tell the sun that the earth belongs to you.” Roussan wrote the poem in a bar in Casablanca, about what colonialism had done to sixteen year old named Nedje, a sex worker as so many are in Casablanca, Haiti, and India. What do the many Nedjes of India think of raga? Does it make them smile? The world continues to call the sitar forth, and let us hope that Shankar, and others continue to sit and play both immensity and intensity into existence, leaving traces of a heart intertwined within the world, the one we all find ourselves in.