Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar master who built a global following and pioneered the charity concert, has died.Norah Jones has been featured here on Midnite Music.
His official website carried this statement: “With profound grief and sorrow, we mourn the passing of Pandit Ravi Shankar on December 11, 2012. He died in San Diego at 4:30 pm Pacific time. He was 92.”
Shankar influenced the music of the Beatles and was also the father of jazz-pop star Norah Jones (he played virtually no role in her life when she was growing up). Another of his daughters (by another mother), Anoushka Shankar, has also built a following as a sitar player.
And that's about as much as most westerner know about him, me included. I always thought the music was interesting, and suggested that multiple systems of music could exist to be enjoyed, but since I have enough trouble mastering the guitar, I never gave Indian music much attention:
Born in 1920 in Varanasi to a well-off Brahmin family, Shankar left a possible career as a dancer behind to study sitar.
From an early age he was driven by a powerful blend of curiosity and spirituality. “In my childhood I was always eager to learn about the miraculous feats of such spiritual masters as Lahiri Mahasai or his famous friend Trailanga Swami, who was reputed to be over 300 years old and certainly weighed over 300 pounds.,” he wrote in “Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar.”
He traveled to Paris in the 1930s and broke through as a performer in the West in the 1960s, winning the ear and the respect of Beatles star George Harrison (who became his student).
In “Raga Mala,” Shankar wrote that he met Harrison for the first time in June of 1966 in a friend’s house in London. And while he would see the other Beatles from time to time, “Something clicked from the very beginning with George.”
Ravi and Anoushka Shankar:
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