Ravi Shankar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
 This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (May 2009)
(Find sources: Ravi Shankar – news, books, scholar)
For other persons named Ravi Shankar, see Ravi Shankar (disambiguation).
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar
Background information
Birth name Ravi Shankar
Born April 7, 1920 (1920-04-07) (age 89)
Ghazipur, United Provinces, British India
Genre(s) Indian classical music
Occupation(s) Composer, sitar player
Instrument(s) Sitar
Years active 1939 – present
Label(s) Angel, Dark Horse Records, HMV, Private Music
Associated acts Ustad Alla Rakha
Yehudi Menuhin
Website RaviShankar.org
Notable instrument(s)
Sitar

Pandit Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর, "Pandit" is honorific) (born April 7 1920) is an Indian sitar player and composer. He is a disciple of Baba Allauddin Khan, the founder of the Maihar gharana of Hindustani classical music,[1] and the father of Grammy-award-winning singer-songwriter Norah Jones and sitar player Anoushka Shankar.

Ravi Shankar is a leading Indian instrumentalist of the modern era. He has been a longtime musical collaborator of tabla-players Ustad Allah Rakha, Kishan Maharaj and intermittently also of sarod-player Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His collaborations with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, film maker Satyajit Ray, and The Beatles (in particular, George Harrison) added to his international reputation.

He has received many awards throughout his career, including three Grammy Awards and an Academy Award nomination. In 1999, Ravi Shankar was awarded the Bharat Ratna award, India's highest civilian honour, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1992 [2].

Contents

[edit] Personal life and education

Ravi Shankar was born in Benares, India. His family came from Narail, Jessore district, East Bengal, now in Bangladesh.

His first wife, sitarist Annapurna Devi is the daughter of his teacher, Ustad Alauddin Khan. Their son, Shubhendra Shankar (1942-92), was also a musician. [3][4]

Shankar had two other children, singer Norah Jones in 1979 with Sue Jones and sitarist Anoushka Shankar in 1981 with Sukanya Shankar. Shankar is the brother of dancer and choreographer, Uday Shankar, with whom he gave stage shows as a child artist. He is the uncle of Indian musician Ananda Shankar and of the Indian dancer and actress Mamata Shankar. The Tamil violinist L. Shankar is not related to Ravi, while Lakshmi Shankar a Hindustani classical vocalist married his uncle Rajendra Shankar.

[edit] Musical career

Ravi Shankar has been on stage from the age of 10 and has travelled widely a dancer and a musician. He performed publicly in India in 1939. He finished his formal training in 1944 and worked out of Mumbai (Bombay). He began writing scores for film and ballet and started a recording career with HMV's Indian affiliate. He became music director of All India Radio in the 1950s. From 1946 onwards he composed music for films. Some of his scores include the ones for Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy and Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. He also composed the tune for Saare Jahan Se Achcha.

Ravi Shankar then became well known to the music world outside India, first performing in the former Soviet Union in 1954 and then the West in 1956. He performed in major events such as the Monterey Pop Festival and at major venues such as the Royal Festival Hall.

Already performing in major concert halls all around the world, Shankar, having attained pop cultural fame, was invited to play venues that were unusual for a classical musician, such as the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in Monterey, California, with Ustad Allah Rakha on tabla. He also performed at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, and with George Harrison was one of the organizers of The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, in an attempt to raise awareness of the growing crisis (see 1970 Bhola cyclone, and Bangladesh Liberation War. Ravi Shankar asked George Harrison for his help to raise funds for Bangladesh. Ravi Shankar & Friends co-headlined Harrison's 1974 tour of North America with mixed reviews. His final working album with Harrison was on a 1997 album, Chants of India, where Harrison developed an interest in chant music. After Harrison's death on 29 November in 2001, Shankar, his daughter, Anoushka, along with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, among many others attended the Concert for George in London, where Shankar dedicated the memorial to Harrison.

Shankar has criticized facets of the Western reception of Indian music. On a trip to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district after performing in Monterey, Shankar wrote,

“ I felt offended and shocked to see India being regarded so superficially and its great culture being exploited. Yoga, Tantra, mantra, kundalini, ganja, hashish, Kama Sutra? They all became part of a cocktail that everyone seemed to be lapping up! ”

In 1969 he published an English language autobiography, "My Music, My Life".

Shankar has written two concertos for sitar and orchestra. His 3rd concerto was given its first performance on January 31, 2009 by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and his daughter Anoushka Shankar.The piece is scored for solo sitar and orchestra consisting of piccolo, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, timpani, 2 percussionists, harp and strings. In the first two concertos, Shankar doubled as composer and soloist. To meet the challenge of notating Indian musical concepts in Western notation, Shankar enlisted Welsh conductor David Murphy to help transcribe the work into an orchestral score.

He has written violin-sitar compositions for Yehudi Menuhin and himself, music for flute virtuoso Jean-Pierre Rampal, music for Hōzan Yamamoto, master of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), and koto virtuoso Musumi Miyashita. He has composed extensively for films and ballets in India, Canada, Europe, and the United States, including Chappaqua, Charly, Gandhi (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), and the Apu Trilogy. His recording Tana Mana, released on the Private Music label in 1987, penetrated the New Age genre with its unique combination of traditional instruments with electronics. In 2002, Ravi composed a piece for "The Concert for George." He did not play at the concert, but his daughter Anoushka led an ensemble of Indian musicians in the piece. The classical composer Philip Glass acknowledges Shankar as a major influence, and the two collaborated to produce Passages, a recording of compositions in which each reworks themes composed by the other. Shankar also composed the sitar part in Glass's 2004 composition Orion.

Ravi Shankar has homes in Encinitas, California and New Delhi, Delhi, India.

[edit] Teaching

 This article may contain wording that promotes the subject subjectively without imparting verifiable information. Please remove or replace such wording, unless you can cite independent sources that support the characterization.

Some of his well-known students are George Harrison, Kartik Kumar, Chandrakant Sardeshmukh, Deepak Chowdhury, Harihar Rao, Amiya Das Gupta, Shamim Ahmed, Partho Sarathy, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Manju Mehta, Shubhendra Rao, Kartik Seshadri, Stephen Slavek, Stephen James, Tarun Bhattacharya, Jaya Bose, and David Murphy. His daughter Anoushka started learning from him at the age of 8 and frequently accompanies him in concerts in addition to her solo performances.

[edit] Honours

Shankar is an honorary member of the International Rostrum of Composers. He has received many awards and honours from his own country and from all over the world, including 14 honorary doctorates, the Padma Vibhushan, Desikottam, the Magsaysay Award from Manila, three Grammy Awards, the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (Grand Prize) from Japan, and the Crystal Award from Davos, with the title "Global Ambassador", to name but some. In 1986 he was nominated to be a member of the Rajya Sabha, India's upper house of Parliament, for six years. In 2002, he was conferred the inaugural Indian Chamber of Commerce Lifetime Achievement Award. The Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, was awarded to him in 1999. In 1998 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize with Ray Charles. He shared an Academy Award nomination with George Fenton for Best Original Score to Gandhi (1982).

[edit] Discography

[edit] Films

[edit] Bibliography

  • Raga Mala (1997) (Autobiography edited by George Harrison)
  • Learning Indian music: A systematic approach (1979)
  • My Music, My Life (1968) (Autobiography)
  • Music memory (1967)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ravi Shankar - Biography
  2. ^ The 1992 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts - Biography of Ravi Shankar Ramon Magsaysay Award website.
  3. ^ Unveiling the mystique of a reclusive artiste
  4. ^ New generation of music maestros

[edit] External links

Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ravi Shankar
v • d • e
Bharat Ratna laureates

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1954) · C. Rajagopalachari (1954) · C. V. Raman (1954) · Bhagwan Das (1955) · Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya (1955) · Jawaharlal Nehru (1955) · Govind Ballabh Pant (1957) · Dhondo Keshav Karve (1958) · Bidhan Chandra Roy (1961) · Purushottam Das Tandon (1961) · Dr. Rajendra Prasad (1962) · Dr. Zakir Hussain (1963) · Pandurang Vaman Kane (1963) · Lal Bahadur Shastri (1966) · Indira Gandhi (1971) · V. V. Giri (1975) · K. Kamaraj (1976) · Mother Teresa (1980) · Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1983) · Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1987) · M. G. Ramachandran (1988) · B. R. Ambedkar (1990) · Nelson Mandela (1990) · Rajiv Gandhi (1991) · Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1991) · Morarji Desai (1991) · Abul Kalam Azad (1992) · J. R. D. Tata (1992) · Satyajit Ray (1992) · A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (1997) · Gulzarilal Nanda (1997) · Aruna Asaf Ali (1997) · M. S. Subbulakshmi (1998) · Chidambaram Subramaniam (1998) · Jayaprakash Narayan (1998) · Ravi Shankar (1999) · Amartya Sen (1999) · Gopinath Bordoloi (1999) · Lata Mangeshkar (2001) · Bismillah Khan (2001) · Bhimsen Joshi (2008)

 Bharat Ratna
v • d • e
Anoushka Shankar
Studio albums
Live albums
Benefit concerts
Related articles
Ravi Shankar (father)  · Norah Jones (half-sister)
v • d • e
Norah Jones
Studio albums
Other albums
Singles
Related articles
Discography · Tour · Awards · The Little Willies · Ravi Shankar · Anoushka Shankar
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Shankar"
Personal tools