Anoushka Shankar wants you to hear the sitar differently
Throughout her career, Anoushka Shankar has resisted people putting her music into a box.
As the daughter of the legendary sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar, Anoushka is often confronted with the expectation that she'd only make traditional Indian classical music. But since the late '90s, the Grammy-nominated sitar player has pushed the boundaries of her instrument, incorporating symphonic, electronic, jazz and pop music into her sound.
"I feel with every increasing year, I chafe just that little bit more around what feels like a restrictive perception around my instrument: the sitar," Anoushka tells Q 's Tom Power in an interview. "If you think of a guitar or you think of a piano … you don't necessarily automatically think of a genre — you think of the instrument. It can be used to dig into any number of genres and it could be a part of those."
WATCH | Anoushka Shankar's full interview with Tom Power:
For most people around the world, Anoushka says the sitar conjures a very specific set of images, such as the 1960s, incense, flying carpets or meditation. "Those things are a part of its history, they're a part of its journey, but the instrument is also broader and bigger than that and has so many other possibilities."
Recently, Anoushka released Chapter III: We Return to Light, the final chapter in a trilogy of mini-albums she started two years ago. The album was inspired by Goa, India, and the trance music and raves she found there in her 20s.
I would just be on dance floors till morning or I'd be out in Goa at a rave for two days. - Anoushka Shankar
"Throughout my 20s, I kind of felt like I lived a sort of double life," she says. "I was touring with my dad as a teenager, and then I was touring on my own. I was on all these classical stages, and I was playing ragas…. Then I'd kind of get things out of my system by … having this completely other life where I'd be with friends and DJs and artists. I would just be on dance floors till morning or I'd be out in Goa at a rave for two days."
WATCH | Anoushka Shankar performing New Dawn:
In her mid-20s, Anoushka started to merge those different interests through her music. On her 2016 album, Land of Gold, she started looping, layering and touring with a pedal board for the first time.
"It's another part of how I've changed the way I think with my instrument, because suddenly you can be a bit more orchestral or a bit more layered in the way that we play a linear melodic instrument," she says.
"Coming back to the Indian classical music that the sitar comes from, it's a system based on melody and rhythm — or ragas and talas — not harmony and counterpoint like Western music. So our instruments simply aren't designed to play chords and those kind of broad textures in an accurate way. It's more lead melody stuff, even if we have resonating strings to make it sound fuller."
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