She’s barely out of her teens, but Anoushka Shankar has built up a reputation as a sitarist that makes the precocity angle seem outdated. If there are any lingering doubts about her innate gifts on the instrument that her father, Ravi, gave a global profile, Anoushka goes a long way towards settling them on her second official recording, Anourag (Angel 7243556969; 53:52). She has shown an easy command of the technical challenges of the instrument, and her sense of music making and her improvisational voice grow ever more relaxed. Here she performs six relatively short but inspired ragas. On the final raga, “Pancham Se Gara,” her father joins her in a warm duet that finds them swapping extemporaneous assertions around a melodic foundation.
Anoushka stands to repeat the cultural service that her father did over 30 years ago: making the world’s ears safe for the sublimity of Hindustani music.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro