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Sunday Morning with Anoushka Shankar
The daughter of the late legend Ravi Shankar discusses her new project — a trilogy of mini albums — and her upcoming North American tour.
Anouska Shankar / Laura Lewis photo, courtesy of JP Cutler Media
Sitarist Anoushka Shankar is kicking off a 15-city North American tour on Oct. 3 in Storrs, Connecticut, and simultaneously releasing the first mini album — ‘Forever, For Now’ — of a trilogy.
In an interview with New India Abroad, punctuated with bits of irreverent wit, and remembrances of her late father, Shankar discussed the inspiration for her musical trilogy, conceived shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Daydreaming,’ the first song from the new album was released on September 15.
Excerpts:
NIA: I watched you and your late father give a mesmerizing performance in 2009 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Do you still draw inspiration from your father? How has he affected the trajectory of your musical career?
Anoushka Shankar: He's still one of my hugest influences. I'll sometimes very actively look back at his work or my lessons with him to relearn or rethink of something or try and do my version of that.
But it goes deeper than that with him. He was my teacher right from the beginning. So his sort of style of music making, the way he taught me, like all of that is very embedded in my own music making because my music making was formed by learning with him.
Even when I'm doing something that maybe on paper doesn't necessarily look like it's got his stamp on it, it must still be in there somewhere because that's the ground from which I start with everything.
NIA: Ahead of your North American tour next month, you have released ‘Forever, For Now,’ the first of a trilogy of what you describe as mini albums. Could you describe the concept?
Anoushka Shankar: I've been making music for a while now, and I'm very used to the conventional album structure of making something that's approximately an hour in length. And I always think very thematically about those albums. I tend to have an overarching theme or a story or something that threads it together. They're never just random songs.
I was struggling during the pandemic and post -pandemic period to know what I wanted to make for a next album. And for me, turning it into something that felt more like immediate snapshots that I was sharing with people quicker somehow just freed me.
Musically, what that did for me was just bring me back to what creativity is about, which is just not over-analyzing, not overthinking, just getting in a room with artists and making music. I just found myself very curious about what it would be to release music as an evolving story. But it’s also a weird danger: I have no idea what Chapter 3 is yet.
NIA: ‘Daydreaming,’ the first song on the new album is derived from a Carnatic lullaby. Can you tell us more?
Anoushka Shankar: It’s a song that my mom, my grandmother used to sing to me when I was young. It's very beloved in the South of India. And it kind of came back to me when I was with my kids one afternoon. I may have known it in my childhood, but I've never played it on the sitar.
So to hear the melodies that I knew in a Southern Indian inflection, but then to try that on my sitar felt very intriguing. It was a different way of bending notes.
And then I also liked the idea of placing that as a real lullaby, slowing it down, rearranging it with a piano, making it very much a new feeling to that song. All the other songs on Chapter One are more fully original. They're not drawn from anything else. But they all kind of exist in what I feel like would fit on that kind of a lazy summer's afternoon.
I was in a phase of wanting to allow my vulnerability, allow tenderness, to really be in that place as a musician. ‘Forever For Now’ was this idea that, even when we say forever, we actually don't know. It could just be for now, whatever that's about. And whatever we think of as forever is only for a certain amount of now. It's hardly ever actually forever.
So there was this sense of really being present and really appreciating the preciousness of everything because we can't actually take forever for granted.
So the musical themes and the feelings in that sense were very much coming out of the experience of the pandemic. I still feel like that has lingered for me emotionally. You know, the idea of how quickly everything can fall apart.
NIA: Your North American tour: what do you hope to bring to your audiences this time?
Anoushka Shankar: This year I'm touring with an incredibly versatile and dynamic group of musicians who can kind of travel as well as I do between genres and styles and rhythms and dynamics. So we can really just follow each other at a moment's notice and play shifting music, which is really exciting. And yeah, they're all just gorgeous musicians. It’s a mix of some of the new music from ‘Chapter one.’ It's also a lot of improvised stuff or reinterpreted versions of old things. So yeah, a little bit of everything.
Anoushka Shankar -- North American Tour Dates
October 3, 2023 -- Storrs, CT -- Jorgensen Center
October 5, 2023 -- Ridgefield, CT -- Ridgefield Playhouse
October 6, 2023 -- Bethesda, MD -- Strathmore Music Center
October 7, 2023 -- New York, NY -- Pioneer Works
October 8, 2023 -- Boston, MA -- Berklee Performance Center
October 10, 2023 -- Montreal, QC -- Place Des Arts, Theatre Maisonneuve
October 11, 2023 -- Ottawa, ON -- National Arts Center, Southam Hall
October 13, 2023 -- Chicago, IL -- CSO Symphony Center
October 14, 2023 -- Toronto, ON -- Koerner Hall
October 15, 2023 -- Vancouver, BC -- Chan Shun Concert Hall
October 17, 2023 -- Seattle, WA -- Moore Theater
October 18, 2023 -- San Francisco, CA -- Herbst Theater
October 20, 2023 -- Santa Fe, NM -- Lensic Center
October 21, 2023 -- Orange, CA -- Musco Center for the Arts
October 22, 2023 -- Northridge, CA -- Great Hall at The Soraya
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