Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar | |
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Ravi Shankar with his sitar
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Background information | |
Birth name | Ravi Shankar |
Born | April 7, 1920 Benares, United Provinces, British India |
Genre(s) | Indian classical music |
Occupation(s) | Composer, sitar player |
Instrument(s) | Sitar |
Years active | 1939 – present |
Label(s) | HMV, Private Music |
Associated acts |
George Harrison Anoushka Shankar |
Website | RaviShankar.org |
Pandit Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শঙ্কর Robi Shôngkor, Devanagari: रवि शंकर, born April 7, 1920, in Benares, United Provinces, British India) is an Indian composer and sitar player. He is a disciple of Allauddin Khan (founder of the Maihar gharana of Indian classical music).
He is considered one of the greatest sitar players of modern times. He is also among the Indian classical musicians to have achieved fame in Europe and America. This was in some part due to his association with The Beatles (particularly George Harrison, who described Shankar as the "Godfather of world music") as well as with his own personal charisma.
Shankar's musical career spans eight decades, from the 1930s to the 2000s. He holds the Guinness Record for the longest international career. Shankar is the father of singer Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar.
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Musical career
This means that Ravi not only studied under Allaudin Khan, but actually lived with him as if he were his son. This type of mentorship is typical of the Indian Classical music tradition. Ravi's first public performances in India came in 1939. Formal training ended in 1944, and he 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.
Shankar then became well known to the music world outside India, first performing in the Soviet Union in 1953 and then the West in 1956. He performed in major events such as the Edinburgh Festival as well as major venues such as Royal Festival Hall.
He 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 Harrison was one of the organizers of The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, in an attempt to raise awareness of the growing crisis that was occurring in East Pakistan where Shankar's family origins lay. 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 grew an interest in chant music. After his colleague's death on 29 November in 2001, after 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 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.
Shankar has written two concertos for sitar and orchestra, violin-sitar compositions for Yehudi Menuhin and himself, music for flute virtuoso Jean Pierre Rampal, and music for Hōzan Yamamoto, master of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), and koto virtuoso . 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 and his daughter Anoushka played at "The Concert For George". 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 Shankar has homes in Encinitas, California; Warren, New Jersey; and New Delhi.
Honors
Shankar is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of the United Nations 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, , 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).
Discography
- (1958)
- Improvisations (1962)
- (1962)
- (1963)
- (1964)
- (1964)
- (1964)
- (1965)
- (1967)
- (1967)
- (1967)
- (1967)
- (1968)
- (1968)
- (1968)
- (1987)
- Woodstock Festival (1969)
Films
- Prominently figures in D.A. Pennebaker's classic documentary Monterey Pop
- Performed music for the animated short, A Chairy Tale (directed by Norman McLaren)
- Music Direction Apu Trilogy (directed by Satyajit Ray)
- Composed original score for "Alice in Wonderland" (1966, directed by Jonathan Miller)
- Chappaqua (1966, directed by Conrad Rooks)
- Raga (1971) (directed by Howard Worth)
- The Concert for Bangladesh (1971)
- Music Gandhi (directed by Richard Attenborough) (Academy Award nomination for Shankar)
- Concert for George (2003)
- Forbidden Image (directed by Jeremy Marre)
- Charly (directed by Ralph Nelson)
- Woodstock: The Movie
- Anuradha- Composed the soundtrack for this 1960 Hindi movie
Bibliography
- Raga Mala (1997) (Autobiography edited by George Harrison)
- Learning Indian music: A systematic approach (1979)
- My Music, My Life (1968) (Autobiography)
- Music memory (1967)
External links
- Ravi Shankar Official Website
- His autobiography - My Music, My Life
- Audio excerpts from a 2000 interview for the BBC
- Ravi Shankar Interview 4/13/07
- Ravi Shankar Interview
- Stream and 2005 interview for his 85th birthday
- EMI Biography
- Sestina by Shankar
- Hard to say no to free love: Ravi Shankar
- Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar
- Listen Online streamed music by Ravi Shankar
Persondata | |
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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 |