Associated Press
The Beatles' George Harrison with Ravi Shankar in 1967.
Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as the Beatles and other rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died on Tuesday in San Diego. He was 92.
Mr. Shankar died in a hospital near his home, his family said in a statement, adding that he had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday.
Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose virtuosity transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.
Mr. Shankar collaborated with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, and was a mentor to the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. But Western interest in his instrument, the sitar, exploded in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles encountered one on the set of “Help!,” the Beatles’ second film.
Harrison was intrigued by the instrument, with its small rounded body, long neck and resonating gourd at the top, and its complexity: it has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings, which are not played but which resonate freely as the other strings are plucked. He soon learned its rudiments and used it that year on a Beatles recording, “Norwegian Wood.”
The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups quickly followed suit, although few went as far as Harrison, who recorded several songs on Beatles albums with Indian musicians rather than with his band mates. By the summer of 1967 the sitar was in vogue in the rock world.
At first Mr. Shankar reveled in the attention his connection with popular culture brought him, and he performed for huge audiences at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969. He also performed, with the tabla virtuoso Alla Rakha and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, at an all-star concert at Madison Square Garden in 1971 that Harrison organized to help Mr. Shankar raise money for the victims of political upheaval in Bangladesh.
Last week Mr. Shankar was told that he would receive a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in February, said Neil Portnow, the head of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.
In addition to his frequent tours as a sitarist, Mr. Shankar, the father of the singer Norah Jones and the sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, was a prolific composer of film music (including the score for Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” in 1982), ballets, electronic works and concertos for sitar and Western orchestras.
In 1988 his seven-movement “Swar Milan” was performed at the Palace of Culture in Moscow by an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble, members of the Moscow Philharmonic and the Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Mr. Shankar’s own group of Indian musicians. And in 1990 he collaborated with the Minimalist composer Philip Glass — who had worked as his assistant on the film score for “Chappaqua” in the late 1960s — on “Passages,” a recording of works he and Mr. Glass composed for each other.
“I have always had an instinct for doing new things,” Mr. Shankar said in 1985. “Call it good or bad, I love to experiment.”
But he came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake, saying he deplored the use of his music, which has its roots in an ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug taking.
“On one hand,” he said in a 1985 interview, “I was lucky to have been there at a time when society was changing. And although much of the hippie movement seemed superficial, there was also a lot of sincerity in it, and a tremendous amount of energy. What disturbed me, though, was the use of drugs and the mixing of drugs with our music. And I was hurt by the idea that our classical music was treated as a fad — something that is very common in Western countries.
Ravi Shankar, Sitarist Who Introduced Indian Music to the West, Dies at 92
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Ravi Shankar, Sitarist Who Introduced Indian Music to the West, Dies at 92
