It’s hard to think of any other music-making device which has such an
air of both the archaic and the transcendent as the sitar, the
traditional stringed instrument central to the Hindustani classical
music of the Indian subcontinent. Probably invented in the 13th century,
but with roots shared with the far more ancient “veena”, the sitar is a
visual work of art in itself. For years its sound was unknown in the
West, until Ravi Shankar opened up a whole new world of possibilities.
Through his pioneering tours, ground-breaking compositions for
orchestras and artists such as Yehudi Menuhin, and role as teacher and
mentor to George Harrison, John Coltrane and Philip Glass, he brought
his music and culture to audiences of disparate ages and genres across
the globe. More than just one of the great artistic figures of the 20th
century, he was a musical philosopher whose sitar brought people
together and whose spirituality transcended cultural and political
differences. That the sitar has since become a fixture in the musical
worldview of open-minded listeners is solely due to Ravi Shankar.
Anoushka
Shankar is now both conserving her father’s musical philosophy and
extending it into new sound spaces and contexts. The 32-year old artist
not only served her apprenticeship in Indian classical music under Ravi
Shankar and performed on stage with him for nearly twenty years, but
also benefited from a curious and open-minded upbringing across three
continents, and has always pushed the cultural dialogue her father began
even further in her own music. She released her first album,
“Anoushka”, in 1998, when she was just 17, and since then has worked
with musicians as varied as Sting, Herbie Hancock, Jethro Tull, Concha
Buika, Mstislav Rostropovich and Thievery Corporation. For the past
decade and a half, this spirited, visionary and clear-sighted musician
has subtly and successfully incorporated traditional Indian sounds into a
musical panorama dominated by contemporary styles, bringing the
spiritual roots of her music to younger generations.
Shankar’s
seventh CD, “Traces of You”, marks a significant step along her pathway
as a musician and woman. With the aim of bringing together a variety of
cultural experiences and attitudes as organically as possible, she
worked with London-based British-Indian producer Nitin Sawhney,
particularly noted for fusing Eastern influences with electronica and,
more generally, a non-didactic interweaving of Western and Eastern
soundscapes for which London, Anoushka’s home and place of birth,
provides the optimal environs.
However, “Traces of You” goes
beyond resolving music-related dilemmas. The direction of the initial –
and solely musical – exploration was inspired by the idea that
everything in the universe leaves an indelible mark, or a subtle
“trace”, on everything else it comes into contact with, and Anoushka
drew on her relationships and multicultural lifestyle to trace a journey
of love, change and loss. As it happened, life itself would leave
traces on the album’s production. Having lost her father during the
process of recording, it was inevitable that her loss became the central
focus of the songwriting. However, the music is ultimately hopeful
rather than mournful, as whilst losing her father Anoushka was also
occupied with raising Zubin, her young son. Intense joy, pain and
sadness intermingled and “Traces of You” became Anoushka’s catharsis
through a difficult period, leading ultimately to the greater emotion
behind all the others: love. Three forms of love, love for her father,
her husband, and her son, proved to be the ultimate inspiration for some
of the deepest music Anoushka has yet written. She worked on “Traces of
You” for over a year, conceiving it as a unified concept, an unending
circle, from the first track to the last. “I approached the album as a
whole,” she explains, “as opposed to a series of songs. A lot of it
happened unconsciously. Life took a journey of its own and the music
followed that form. The sitar leads the listener through the album like a
narrator.”
With this in mind, it is certainly notable that
although the individual tracks are considerably shorter than traditional
raga performances, a strong narrative strand is threaded through not
only the three songs for which her half-sister Norah Jones provides
vocals, but the ten instrumental tracks as well. Shankar’s central theme
is that of the cycle of life – from her perspective as a daughter,
mother and wife. “Life goes on. Things end and things begin and our
endings are not the ending because life goes on beyond us, and we go on
beyond this life. It’s bigger than I can ever imagine and there’s a flow
that connects everything, even when you can’t really understand it in
the moment. A lot of the most painful things I’ve ever been through have
led to some of the most beautiful things that have ever happened. I was
quite aware of that kind of metamorphosis when making this record.
There was a lot of pain, a lot of joy, a lot of beauty, a lot of
sadness, and sometimes they were all completely mixed up together.”
Despite
all its manifest multiculturalism,
“Traces of You” is far more than
just another crossover album. It’s not about seeing how far it’s
possible to go in amalgamating familiar sound textures, but asking how
accurately music can capture myriad states of mind and experiences
within a reality characterised by such a range of different cultures,
ethnicities, traditions and life stories. This CD has something to say
not only about Anoushka Shankar, but about every listener willing to
engage with its individually heterogeneous, but collectively incredibly
cohesive tracks. Taken as a whole, the thirteen chapters of her
narrative reveal numerous overtones and undertones woven throughout the
length of the album, conveying a message about the impermanent nature of
the world.
“Traces of You” is also a collaborative work. Nitin
Sawhney was involved in all aspects of the CD from the creative
processes of writing, arranging, programming and playing, right up to
the final production stages. Shankar had worked with Sawhney twice
previously, and knew that she could completely trust in his intuitive
understanding of the soundscapes she envisioned. The immense suppleness
of tracks such as “Flight”, “Maya” and “Lasya“ stems from the almost
unlimited possibilities of the Hang, a relatively new instrument that
looks something like a cross between a steel drum and a flying saucer.
Austrian Hang player Manu Delago understands perfectly how to blend his
instrument with the sitar, as well as with Ian Burdge’s gentle cello and
Sawhney’s virtuosic guitar and piano work and sophisticated electronic
sounds. The use of a great variety of Indian percussion, in the hands of
Anoushka’s regular collaborators Tanmoy Bose and Pirashanna Thevarajah,
also creates numerous volatile bridges between worlds. On the three
tracks on which Norah Jones appears with Shankar, the two artists’ very
different timbres blend together amazingly well; neither musician has to
make concessions to the other. The songs are well-suited to the
sophisticated intensity of Jones’s smoky vocals, and Shankar’s clever
use of Indian rhythmic accompaniment creates surprising textures around
the sisters’ performances, especially on the impressive album opener
“The Sun Won’t Set”, a brilliant confluence of life experiences on three
continents. Like her father, Anoushka Shankar displays an enormous
talent for effortlessly integrating even the most contrasting of musical
components into her sound universe.
She takes the same approach
when it comes to all the songs on the album, from the
minimalism-inspired “Metamorphosis” to the electronica-tinged “Maya”,
and from the Americana-steeped songs that Norah Jones sings to the
sitar-driven, raga-based compositions “Monsoon” and “In Jyoti’s Name”,
which serve as a potent reminder of Shankar’s classical Indian roots.
Even though the baroque-sounding gem “Indian Summer”, with its hypnotic
blend of the sitar and Sawhney’s piano, initially appears to be at odds
with the aforementioned songs, it is just this integration of
contrasting styles that brings the album full circle.
On “Traces
of You”, an unusually insightful artist tells a hauntingly individual
and thus very poignant story about matters that concern every single one
of us: the eternal interplay of loss and hope, of transience and new
beginnings. It is filled with sensuality, but also makes an impassioned
plea for us all to realise that despite our widely varying social,
cultural, religious and geographical circumstances, our fundamental
human experiences are broadly similar. “Traces of You” creates an
uplifting soundscape that shimmers with the contagious power of hope.
