Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar playing his sitar.
Ravi Shankar playing his sitar.
Background information
Birth name Pandit Ravi Shankar
Born April 7, 1920 (1920-04-07) (age 89)
Benares, United Provinces, British India
Genre(s) Indian classical music
Occupation(s) Composer, sitar player
Instrument(s) Sitar
Years active 1939 – present
Label(s) Angel, Dark Horse Records, HMV, Private Music
Associated acts Ustad Alla Rakha
Yehudi Menuhin
Website RaviShankar.org
Notable instrument(s)
Sitar

Pandit Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর is honorific), born April 7, 1920, in Benares, India is a Bengali Indian sitar player and composer; his family originates from East Bengal (later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh). He is a disciple of Baba Allauddin Khan, the founder of the Maihar gharana of Hindustani classical music.[1]

Ravi Shankar is a leading Indian instrumentalist of the modern era. He has been a longtime musical collaborator of tabla-players Ustad Allah Rakha, Kishen maharaj and intermittently also of sarod-player Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His collaborations with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, film maker Satyajit Ray, and the The Beatles (in particular, George Harrison) added to his international reputation.

In 1999, Ravi Shankar was awarded the Bharat Ratna award, India's highest civilian honor.

Contents

Musical career

Ravi Shankar has been on stage from the age of 10 and has been all over the world as a dancer and a musician. He first performed publicly in India in 1939. He finished his formal training in 1944 and worked out of Bombay. He began writing scores for film and ballet and started a recording career with HMV's Indian affiliate. He became music director of All India Radio in the 1950s. From 1946 onwards he began to compose original music for films. Some of his most noted scores include the ones for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. He also composed the tune for Saare Jahan Se Achcha.

Ravi Shankar then became well known to the music world outside India, first performing in the former Soviet Union in 1954 and then the West in 1956. He performed in major events such as the Monterey Pop Festival and at major venues such as the Royal Festival Hall.

Already performing in major concert halls all around the world, Shankar, having attained pop cultural fame, was invited to play venues that were unusual for a classical musician, such as the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in Monterey, California, with Ustad Allah Rakha on tabla. He was also one of the artists who performed at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, and with George Harrison was one of the organizers of The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, in an attempt to raise awareness of the growing crisis (see 1970 Bhola cyclone, Bangladesh Liberation War and 1971 Bangladesh atrocities carried out by West Pakistan Army) that was occurring in East Pakistan (now independent Bangladesh) at the hand of West Pakistan Army where Shankar's family origins lay. It was Ravi Shankar who asked George Harrison for his help to raise funds for Bangladesh. Ravi Shankar & Friends co-headlined Harrison's 1974 tour of North America with mixed reviews. His final working album with Harrison was on a 1997 album, Chants of India, where Harrison developed an interest in chant music. After his colleague's death on 29 November in 2001, following a long fight against cancer, Shankar, his daughter, Anoushka, along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, among many others attended the Concert for George in London, where Shankar dedicated the memorial to Harrison.

Shankar has been critical of some facets of the Western reception of Indian music. On a trip to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district after performing in Monterey, Shankar wrote, "I felt offended and shocked to see India being regarded so superficially and its great culture being exploited. Yoga, Tantra, mantra, kundalini, ganja, hashish, Kama Sutra? They all became part of a cocktail that everyone seemed to be lapping up!" In 1969 he published an English language autobiography, "My Music, My Life".

Always ahead of his time, Shankar has written two concertos for sitar and orchestra, violin-sitar compositions for Yehudi Menuhin and himself, music for flute virtuoso Jean Pierre Rampal, music for Hōzan Yamamoto, master of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), and koto virtuoso Musumi Miyashita. He has composed extensively for films and ballets in India, Canada, Europe, and the United States, including Chappaqua, Charly, Gandhi (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), and the Apu Trilogy. His recording Tana Mana, released on the Private Music label in 1987, penetrated the New Age genre with its unique combination of traditional instruments with electronics. In 2002, Ravi composed a piece for "The Concert for George." He did not play at the concert, but his daughter Anoushka led an ensemble of Indian musicians in the piece. The classical composer Philip Glass acknowledges Shankar as a major influence, and the two collaborated to produce Passages, a recording of compositions in which each reworks themes composed by the other. Shankar also composed the sitar part in Glass's 2004 composition Orion.

Ravi Ambasana has homes in Encinitas, California and New Delhi, Delhi, India.

Teaching

Ravi Shankar has taught innumerable students in India and abroad. Significant contributions have been made to Indian music by Kartik Kumar (Sitar), Deepak Chowdhury, Harihar Rao, Amiya das Gupta, Shamim Ahmed, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Manju Mehta, Shubhendra Rao, Kartik Seshadri, Stephen Slavek, Stephen James, Tarun Bhattacharya(Santoor), Jaya Bose (Sitar), David Murphy and so on. All of them carry on the legacy of Ravi Shankar.

Anoushka Shankar started learning with him at the age of 8 and has already travelled with Ravi Shankar all over the world giving recitals in major European Countries as well as the United States.

Honours

Shankar is an honorary member of the International Rostrum of Composers. He has received many awards and honours from his own country and from all over the world, including 14 honorary doctorates, the Padma Vibhushan, Desikottam, the Magsaysay Award from Manila, three Grammy Awards, the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (Grand Prize) from Japan, and the Crystal Award from Davos, with the title "Global Ambassador," to name but some. In 1986 he was nominated to be a member of the Rajya Sabha, India's upper house of Parliament, for six years. In 2002, he was conferred the inaugural Indian Chamber of Commerce Lifetime Achievement Award. The Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, was awarded to him in 1999. In 1998 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize with Ray Charles. He shared an Academy Award nomination with George Fenton for Best Original Score to Gandhi (1982).

Family

His first wife, sitarist Annapurna Devi is the daughter of his teacher, Ustad Alauddin Khan. They had a son, Shubhendra Shankar (1942-92), who was also a muscian. [2][3]

Shankar later had two other children, singer Norah Jones in 1979 with Sue Jones and sitarist Anoushka Shankar in 1981 with Sukanya Shankar. Shankar is also the brother of dancer Uday Shankar and uncle of fellow Indian musician Ananda Shankar.

Discography

Films

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Ravi Shankar - Biography
  2. ↑ Unveiling the mystique of a reclusive artiste
  3. ↑ New generation of music maestros

External links

Persondata
NAME Shankar, Ravi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES রবি শঙ্কর (Bengali); Shôngkor, Robi (Bengali transliteration)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Musician
DATE OF BIRTH April 7 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
DATE OF DEATH living
PLACE OF DEATH