The Associated Press
Aug. 3, 1967 file photo shows George Harrison, of the Beatles, left, sitting cross-legged with his musical mentor, Ravi Shankar, of India, in Los Angeles, as Harrison explains to newsmen that Shankar is teaching him to play the sitar
Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso who became a hippie musical icon of
the 1960s after hobnobbing with the Beatles and who introduced
traditional Indian ragas to Western audiences over a 10-decade career,
died Tuesday. He was 92.
A statement on the musician's
website said he died in San Diego, near his Southern California home.
The musician's foundation issued a statement saying that he had suffered
upper respiratory and heart problems and had undergone heart-valve
replacement surgery last week.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also confirmed his death and called Shankar a "national treasure."
Labeled
"the godfather of world music" by George Harrison, Shankar helped
millions of classical, jazz and rock lovers discover the centuries-old
traditions of Indian music.
He also pioneered the concept
of the rock benefit with the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. To later
generations, he was known as the estranged father of popular American
singer Norah Jones.
His
last musical performance was with his other daughter, sitarist Anoushka
Shankar Wright, on Nov. 4 in Long Beach, Calif; his foundation said it
was to celebrate his 10th decade of creating music. The multiple Grammy
winner learned that he had again been nominated for the award the night
before his surgery.
As early as the 1950s, Shankar began
collaborating with and teaching some of the greats of Western music,
including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.
He played well-received shows in concert halls in Europe and the United
States, but faced a constant struggle to bridge the musical gap between
the West and the East.
Describing an early Shankar tour in 1957, Time magazine said, "U.S. audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled."
His close relationship with Harrison, the Beatles lead guitarist, shot Shankar to global stardom in the 1960s.
Harrison
had grown fascinated with the sitar, a long-necked, string instrument
that uses a bulbous gourd for its resonating chamber and resembles a
giant lute. He played the instrument, with a Western tuning, on the song
"Norwegian Wood," but soon sought out Shankar, already a musical icon
in India, to teach him to play it properly.
The pair
spent weeks together, starting the lessons at Harrison's house in
England and then moving to a houseboat in Kashmir and later to
California.
Gaining confidence with the complex
instrument, Harrison recorded the Indian-inspired song "Within You
Without You" on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,"
helping spark the raga-rock phase of 60s music and drawing increasing
attention to Shankar and his work.
Shankar's popularity
exploded, and he soon found himself playing on bills with some of the
top rock musicians of the era. He played a four-hour set at the Monterey
Pop Festival and the opening day of Woodstock.
Though
the audience for his music had hugely expanded, Shankar, a serious,
disciplined traditionalist who had played Carnegie Hall, chafed against
the drug use and rebelliousness of the hippie culture.
"I
was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all
stoned. To me, it was a new world," Shankar told Rolling Stone of the
Monterey festival.
While he enjoyed Otis Redding and the
Mamas and the Papas at the festival, he was horrified when Jimi Hendrix
lit his guitar on fire.
"That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God," he said.
In 1971, moved by the plight of millions of refugees fleeing into
India to escape war in Bangladesh, Shankar reached out to Harrison to
see what they could do to help.
In what Shankar later
described as "one of the most moving and intense musical experiences of
the century," the pair organized two benefit concerts at Madison Square
Garden that included Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr.
The
concert, which spawned an album and a film, raised millions of dollars
for UNICEF and inspired other rock benefits, including the 1985 Live Aid
concert to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia and the 2010 Hope
For Haiti Now telethon.
Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury was born April 7, 1920, in the Indian city of Varanasi.
At
the age of 10, he moved to Paris to join the world famous dance troupe
of his brother Uday. Over the next eight years, Shankar traveled with
the troupe across Europe, America and Asia, and later credited his early
immersion in foreign cultures with making him such an effective
ambassador for Indian music.
During one tour, renowned
musician Baba Allaudin Khan joined the troupe, took Shankar under his
wing and eventually became his teacher through 7-1/2 years of isolated,
rigorous study of the sitar.
"Khan told me you have to leave everything else and do one thing properly," Shankar told The Associated Press.
In
the 1950s, Shankar began gaining fame throughout India. He held the
influential position of music director for All India Radio in New Delhi
and wrote the scores for several popular films. He began writing
compositions for orchestras, blending clarinets and other foreign
instruments into traditional Indian music.
And he became a de facto tutor for Westerners fascinated by India's musical traditions.
He
gave lessons to Coltrane, who named his son Ravi in Shankar's honor,
and became close friends with Menuhin, recording the acclaimed "West
Meets East" album with him. He also collaborated with flutist Jean
Pierre Rampal, composer Philip Glass and conductors Andre Previn and
Zubin Mehta.
"Any player on any instrument with any ears
would be deeply moved by Ravi Shankar. If you love music, it would be
impossible not to be," singer David Crosby, whose band The Byrds was
inspired by Shankar's music, said in the book "The Dawn of Indian Music
in the West: Bhairavi."
Shankar's personal life, however, was more complex.
His
1941 marriage to Baba Allaudin Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, ended
in divorce. Though he had a decades-long relationship with dancer Kamala
Shastri that ended in 1981, he had relationships with several other
women in the 1970s.
In 1979, he fathered Norah Jones with
New York concert promoter Sue Jones, and in 1981, Sukanya Rajan, who
played the tanpura at his concerts, gave birth to his daughter Anoushka.
He grew estranged from Sue Jones in the 80s and didn't see Norah for a decade, though they later re-established contact.
He
married Rajan in 1989 and trained young Anoushka as his heir on the
sitar. In recent years, father and daughter toured the world together.
When Jones shot to stardom and won five Grammy awards in 2003, Anoushka Shankar was nominated for a Grammy of her own.
Shankar,
himself, has won three Grammy awards and was nominated for an Oscar for
his musical score for the movie "Gandhi." His album "The Living Room
Sessions, Part 1" earned him his latest Grammy nomination, for best
world music album.
Despite his fame, numerous albums and decades of world tours, Shankar's music remained a riddle to many Western ears.
Shankar
was amused after he and colleague Ustad Ali Akbar Khan were greeted
with admiring applause when they opened the Concert for Bangladesh by
twanging their sitar and sarod for a minute and a half.
"If
you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more,"
he told the confused crowd, and then launched into his set.