Latest news with #Anoushka
Indian Express
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Chapter III We Return to Light review: Where music dances with light
It was in 2023 that sitar player Anoushka Shankar decided to capture the sublimity of the moments fleeting past her. She consciously decided to let go of 'the analysis of the moments from a future vantage point' and capture the here and now instead. The result has been three chapters of introspective music, all from different mindsets and geographies. Across the trilogy, Anoushka has tried to craft a continual yet independent sonic narrative, charting an emotional journey through joy of simple moments, uncertainty and grief, and then awakening. While in Chapter 1: Forever, For Now (2023), the sparse pieces emerged from an afternoon with her children in the garden of her London home, Chapter 2: How Dark it is Before Dawn moved to the night and looked at its deeper textures as well as of the mind where the shadows of the past still lingered. Chapter 3: We Return to Light, conceptually, is a return to dawn as well as the basics. Three different producers, different geographies that are home in different ways and different ideas that are still woven into a thread. A collaboration with Alam Khan, US-based son of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the album is a reminder of their fathers: Pt Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar, whose duets have remained a stuff of lore. This, I feel, was going to be the tranquil release for her. While it does echo the bond, and the interplay of the sarod and sitar sounds elegant, some of it feels a little embryonic, like it needed more time. It drifts and you want to not go along sometimes. But what's absolutely gorgeous is the title track, based on raag Maanj Khamaj, often played by their fathers. It shimmers like the dawn Anoushka seeks. Hiraeth (meaning deep longing in Welsh) is another piece that stays. In raag Palash Kaafi, composed by her father, it's perhaps Anoushka's expression of her yearning for him. Dancing on Scorched Earth is a meditative piece in the morning glory that is Ramkali. This is where Korwar sounds fabulous. The other pieces like We burn so brightly, Daybreak and Amrita, for me, fall in the ambient category. They all feel like safe play and one wishes it went beyond the sheltered and into the vulnerable that Anoushka does so well. One is appreciative of how Anoushka has used her own life to represent Hindustani classical music, something that almost never happens in the relatively strict space. From the sadness of a painful past (her partner's infidelity, divorce, many surgeries, finally speaking about her childhood sexual abuse), which resulted in very poignant music, Anoushka is forging ahead. We will be waiting for the music that comes after this transformative journey. Artistes: Anoushka Shankar, Alam Khan, Sarathy Korwar Label: LEITER Available on: Spotify Rating: Three stars
CBC
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
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."
