Anoushka Shankar is doing big things: Playing Lollapalooza and giving sitar music a new direction. But little things are in store too, like her first mini-album
Some 35 acts are slated to play at Lollapalooza India in Mumbai later this month, but only one artist among them is cool enough to have called one of the Beatles “Uncle George”. And she’s bringing her sitar. Anoushka Shankar, 42, started out with platinum-level privilege. Her father is the late Pandit Ravi Shankar, perhaps the best-known sitarist of the last century. He influenced jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, jammed with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and collaborated with George Harrison (hence Uncle George).
Anoushka Shankar plans to release three mini albums over the next few years. (LAURA LEWIS)
Anoushka Shankar has broken free of the inevitable comparisons to her tutor father Ravi Shankar. She’s worked sitar music into classical, contemporary and electronic compositions, picking up nine Grammy nominations. (HT ARCHIVE/ VIJAYANAND GUPTA)Anoushka says, “Conglomerates and corporations with actual money are so bogged down by their own size that they can only make choices guaranteed to bring in more money”. (LAURA LEWIS)Chapter 1: Forever, For Now, has been produced by Arooj Aftab, and has guest appearances by Nils Frahm (piano, glass harmonica, harmonium, slit drum), Gal Maestro (bass) and Magda Giannikou (accordion).Shankar’s India tour covers Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. She’s been busy over the last few years, looking for what she calls a “neo-classical” sound to take sitar music to new listeners, and solo parenting her boys aged 12 and 8 (she was married to British filmmaker Joe Wright from 2010 to 2018). (SHUTTERSTOCK)
