Ravi Shankar, (born: Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury) (7 April 1920 – 11 December 2012), often referred to by the title Pandit, was an Indian musician and composer who played the sitar. He has been described as the best-known contemporary Indian musician. Shankar was born in Varanasi to Bengali Brahmin parents and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956. In 1956, he began to tour Europe and the Americas playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and rock artist George Harrison of the Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continued to perform in the 2000s, sometimes with his younger daughter, Anoushka. He was posthumously awarded two Grammy awards in 2013, one for lifetime achievement, another for The Living Room Sessions Part 1 in the world music category.
Links To Peel []
Indian classical music had become fashionable in 1967 due to George Harrison's use of the sitar on some Beatles tracks. This was copied by other pop groups, with sitars being used on many records of the era, sometimes merely as a gimmick. Peel responded to this trend by occasionally playing tracks by Ravi Shankar on his Perfumed Garden show on Radio London. Shankar was based in the US and only visited Britain to give concerts, but in the late 1960s Peel played records by other Indian classical musicians on his BBC shows. On Top Gear in 1969 he featured sessions by Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan, despite the fact that their music was radically different from anything else heard on the station. On Night Ride, too, shorter Indian music tracks were regularly featured. Indian-influenced music, such as that of John McLaughlin's band Shakti, which included tabla player Zakir Hussain, son of Ravi Shankar's tabla accompanist Alla Rakha, could also be heard on Peel's 1970s programmes. The DJ chose Shakti's session for his programme as one of 1977's sessions of the year, despite the upsurge of punk and new wave music in his playlists of that time.
When punk arrived in the late 70's, Indian music went out of fashion with the new generation of listeners and was rarely heard on Peel's shows. In the 80's he started to play more modern styles of world music, but mostly from Africa rather than Asia. He is not known to have played any records by Anoushka Shankar, or by Ravi Shankar's other daughter, Norah Jones, who gained great commercial success and critical acclaim in the early 2000s, but in 1993 he did play a recording of Ravi Shankar performing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. In the late 80's, classical Indian music was virtually replaced in Peel's playlists by another, more pop-influenced music of Indian origin, Bhangra, which Peel played quite regularly on his show until his death in 2004. In 2016, an album by Ravi Shankar was among the 200 LPs from the Peel Record Collection chosen as part of an exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum on the years 1966-1970.
Shows Played[]
(The following list was compiled only from the database of this site and Lorcan's Tracklistings Archive and is certainly incomplete. Please add further details if known.)
- 10 July 1968: Gat Kirwani (LP: Portrait Of Genius) Fontana TL 5285
- 28 August 1968: Chappaqua (album - Chappaqua (The Original Sound Track Recording))
- 02 October 1968: unknown
- 1969
- 04 May 1969: unknown
- 1971
- 04 September 1971: unknown
- 1993
- 19 November 1993: Solo De Tabla En Ektal (album Ravi Shankar - Ravi Shankar At The Monterey International Pop Festival) World Pacific (Tabla performed by Alla Rakha)
See Also[]
- Ananda Shankar
- Record Collection: V&A LPs
- The Collection (Peel Acres - Nabihah Iqbal)
- The Collection (Peel Acres - DJ Mafalda)
- International Times: Perfumed Garden Column