The master of Indian sitar, whose music influenced Western music at the highest levels, died Tuesday near San Diego. Ravi Shankar was 92. The office of India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Shankar a “national treasure.”
And certainly he had been a leading Indian classical musician for a decade before a young British man asked him for lessons. George Harrison’s request, however, would put his music at an odd intersection with Western pop music, even as it opened new ears to the complex sounds of his instrument, the sitar. Shankar played many of the top festivals of his day, the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, and helped organize the Concert for Bangladesh with George Harrison, before opening a disastrous tour with him in 1974.
Indeed, Bangladesh was prototype for all manner of charity concerts that would follow including another one at Madison Square Garden tonight to aid those affected by hurricane Sandy.
When I talked to Shankar 15 years ago, he was 77 years and proud to be still on the road, with his music proving itself more than a 60s sound effect. To be able to develop your skills in music and be legendary just like Shankar, you can click this contact form.
“Look, in this country, everything goes to selling and advertising, and nothing stays for a long time. There’s always something new coming — a new fad, a new fashion. And everything is so commercialized,” he told me. “I was not like Tiny Tim or someone else coming as a fad.”
Indeed, he kept recording and touring until the end. Last wek he had been nominated for a Grammy in world music for his “The Living Room Sessions Part One.” He regularly toured with his daughter, another respected Indian classical musician, Anoushka Shankar, whose own album is also nominated in that category (Shankar’s other daughter? Norah Jones).
Before Harrison came into his life, there had been some interest in his unusual instrument. John Coltrane, for one, came to him for lessons as well.
But he was struck “ in England especially [by] this hippie movement at all the folk clubs,” Shankar recalled. “My manager booked me in a few of them, and that’s where I saw for the first time — which was very shocking to me — all these weirdos, you know, with a beard and ponytail and very dramatic costumes and smell of patchouli and hash all mixed together. That’s where I learned about people taking LSD and saw those glazed eyes.
“All those things I saw for about a year or so before meeting George,” he said. “So I was very skeptical when I met George; I thought he’d be one of them, you know. But he’s really something else.”
Harrison was serious about learning Indian music, but Shankar cautioned him it wouldn’t come overnight. “I told him, `This is not like picking up the guitar and learning two chords and if you have your talent you can be on your own and start writing songs or whatever.’ This is an entirely different story. It’s like picking up the violin or the cello. You have to give years and years and hours of practice to achieve something. Because it’s not just a particular sound, there’s a whole musical science behind it, a rhythm and everything. It’s very deep.”
Harrison couldn’t commit himself fully to the sitar, as Shankar had done, “because at that time he was committed to the other three [Beatles]. He only had about four or five weeks with me, and then he had to go,’ Shankar said.
But he tried what he knew on “Norwegian Wood (That Bird Has Flown),” a song that made Shankar wince no matter how much he liked his young student.
“It was like a new gimmick for the listener, a new sound. And they were very impressed. But he knows that it was not really something which people who know about sitar would appreciate.”
It would only get worse when other groups from the Lemon Pipers to John Fred & His Playboy Band began adding a sound of sitar to their pop songs. “You would hear a few clangs here and there. It was something novel,” Shankar said.
When those interested in this strange Eastern sound traced it to its source, Shankar found himself with a young, unruly audience. “I was scolding them, telling them not to smoke, sit properly, listen properly.”
Of the rock festivals, “The first one I was quite happy with, the Monterey Pop Festival, because I fought for it and got my seating completely separate, segregated in a sense. It was in the afternoon, and there was nothing before or after my show. And that was good. That was very good. That was the beginning of flower power, love and peace and all that kind of thing. Though the drugs were there, which is something I had been fighting. But still it was good.
“Woodstock,” he said, “was absolutely something I did not like.
“I think by time of Woodstock, it was very negative. It was mostly drugs, and the music was just incidental. It was a big party of half a million people, very happy in the mud and rain but they were also stoned, you know. To me that was not at all the idyllic concert, especially for our music.”
Of his other major appearances, “Bangladesh had an aim and an object, you know, so that was a different thing that was very good also.”
But the 1974 tour with Harrison was a disaster. Crowds ignored Shankar’s half of the show, and “George was having a hoarse voice all around the tour and didn’t want to sing any of the old [Beatles] numbers, which the young audience was clamoring for.”
Shankar better enjoyed the last 40 years, when audiences came to listen and focus on the sounds. “They come with the right attitude and with the respect you command. Like when you go hear Bach, and Beethoven or Mozart. . .. One doesn’t shout or shriek. That was the wrong thing, but happened, and it’s good in a way. I had to be very strong to go through it without selling myself and becoming a cult guru and making money with rock ‘n’ roll and becoming a swami. So you see, I didn’t exploit the situation like maybe some other person might have — become a raga rock king or something like that.
“But through God’s grace, I have gone through this and I’m really very happy now, because today, certainly in this country, and all over the world, my music is appreciated and understood in right manner.”
Some of the young listeners from the ’60s, of course, remained, he said “And they are there at concerts, without the beards or long hair or beads. And they don’t take drugs.”