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"Rising Star of Sitar"
Anoushka Shankar
Sunday, April 1 • 7pm
$58
$38
$32
$25
“Anoushka looks set to be as important a pioneer as her father.”—BBC Music Magazine
Program Notes
When she was only seven, Anoushka Shankar received a custom-made, scaled-down sitar from her father. By the time she made her first public performance at the age of 13, in New Dehli, India, she displayed prodigious skill on the sitar. Some of this meteoric rise can be attributed to her teacher—that same father, renowned sitar master Ravi Shankar. But even he recognizes that her extraordinary musical gift is rooted in something more ineffable. "Anoushka has indeed a rare talent,' he said. "There is something spiritual in the way she plays...she feels the music and gives into it."
On her first three albums, including the Grammy-nominated Anoushka, Shankar paid tribute to the classical Indian sitar tradition, recording her father's compositions and well-known ragas. But on 2005’s Rise, the 25-year-old asserts her own musical identity. Informed as much by her upbringing in London and Southern California (her American accent is considered "cute" by her Indian fans), Rise is an self-assured musical statement which skillfully merges Indian, electronic, and world music influences.
"I really am a fan of combining worlds in my own life," Shankar told NPR. "I live in the modern world, and I appreciate the most cutting-edge parts of it. But I also like to check out as much as I can…I think with this album and getting time off, it really was a question of finally making time for my music to reflect a little more of me."
Her hard work on the album has been greeted with strong praise. JazzTimes hailed the Grammy-nominated Rise for speaking "to a deeper sense of global bonds rather than the usual shotgun marriage of unrelated styles that the world-music aisles are rife with." And though she has stepped out of his long shadow, she continues to pay tribute to her father and teacher Ravi Shankar, regularly performing his orchestral works including the “Concerto No. 1 for Sitar and Orchestra,” and “Nivedan.”
Personnel:
- Anoushka Shankar, sitar
- Tanmoy Bose, tabla
- Ravichandra Kulur, flute
- Leo Dombecki, piano/live electronics
- Clarence Gonsalves, bass
- Aditya Prakash, vocals
- Jesse Charnow, drums
- Sanjeev Shankar, tanpura
Srinija Srinivasan
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