'the godfather of world music' Ravi shankar exhibit at south asia institute by Suzanne Hanney
Ravi Shankar was depicted in Playboy Magazine’s All-Star band in 1968, seated on a carpet, his 4-foot-long sitar balanced at a 45-degree angle on his lap. Alongside him on this musical fantasy team were The Beatles; vocalists Frank Sinatra and Petula Clark; pianist Dave Brubeck; drummer Buddy Rich; Herb Alpert, Al Hirt, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong on the trumpet. Shankar made the cut in 1969 and 1970 too. Shankar is the bridge between Eastern and Western music, according to “Ravi Shankar: Ragamala to Rockstar,” an exhibition of photography, video, films, poster art and ephemera through March 5 at Chicago’s South Asia Institute. George Harrison called Shankar “the godfather of world music,” and his association with The Beatles catapulted him even more into the rockstar superstar stratosphere, said Brian Keigher, exhibit cocurator. “He definitely was a changemaker, the right person at the right time,” said Grammy-nominated sitarist Gaurav Mazumdar, exhibit co-curator. The reason was Shankar’s childhood exposure to the West as a dancer and musician in his brother Uday Shankar’s troupe.
FROM THE STREETS
Born in 1920 in the northern India city of Varanasi, Shankar moved to Paris in 1930. He went to school there and traveled around Europe, the U.S. and Asia with the troupe. He spoke fluent French and English and understood Western audiences and musicians. He knew that the standard three-hour sitar raga wouldn’t work for them, that it had to be packaged differently, Mazumdar said.
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In 1938, Shankar returned to India to study with master sitarist Baba Ustad Allauddin Khan. From 1949 into the mid-1950s, he was the director of music at All India Radio. He traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the U.S. twice in the 1960s. Educated, articulate and handsome, as shown in exhibit portraits by photographers Francesco Scavullo and Yousuf Karsh, Shankar could explain Indian music on popular ’60s television programs like the Smothers Brothers, (pictured in the exhibit), or on the Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas talk shows. The exposure brought Indian music to millions of people in an era before cable TV, when there were only three television stations nationwide, Keigher said. Shankar was right person for the role because he handled it beautifully, Mazumdar said. “He could have been swayed away with the hippie movement and the drugs. He did none of that. He preached, ‘No drugs, let this music take you on a high.’ He stayed true to his tradition and to his music and his guru to the very end.” Harrison first noticed the sitar in April 1965 during filming of “Help!,” which had a sequence with Indian musicians in an Indian restaurant in London. He began playing several months later, after David Crosby of The Byrds, who was on a United Kingdom tour, gave him a Shankar album. Harrison turned to the sitar when John Lennon’s song “Norwegian Wood,” needed a little something more.
What sound would the sitar contribute? With a range of 3½ octaves, the sitar has four melodic strings that provide the overriding notes, whether low, medium or high, Mazumdar said. According to Wikipedia and Brittanica.com, fingering the melodic strings will activate up to 13 “sympathetic strings” that can be tuned to the same notes, an octave higher or lower, to create what some have called a “halo of sound.” Similar to Scottish bagpipes, drone strings add a background tone. According to Mazumdar, the base of the sitar, which is a dried, pumpkin-like gourd, gives resonance that wood would not. In August 1966, Harrison went to India to study with Shankar for six weeks. He returned, more accomplished on the instrument, to write “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967. According to Mazumdar, who studied with Shankar from 1987 until the maestro's death in 2012, Harrison only understood why he was born after he met Shankar. “George was very deep person, conscious of, ‘What am I contributing, what am I leaving behind?’” Shankar was generous with his music, giving it to anyone who wanted to learn it, said Mazumdar, who lived and studied in Shankar’s home for a time. More important than Shankar’s five Grammys was his music, “which had a meditative quality about it, a healing effect on people.” A serious musician with a calm aura, Shankar was nevertheless lighthearted and playful in many ways, Keigher said. “He gave you all his attention when he talked to you.”
