Playlist

Here is a Spotify playlist of some key pieces of Ravi Shankar’s music that are discussed in Indian Sun.

I’ve chosen recordings that I love and that are illustrative of his quality and range. I have included a mixture of shorter and longer pieces in order to keep the total runtime to a manageable length (it’s about 130 minutes). Below are my notes on them. I hope you enjoy listening. I’d welcome feedback via social media or the Contact page.

Notes on the playlist Indian Sun 1: Music by Ravi Shankar

 

1. ‘Raga Rageshri, Part 1 (Alap)’ from Improvisations (1962)

 

A superlative rendition of an alap, the meditative, unaccompanied passage with which Ravi typically opened his performance of a classical raga. Notice his characteristic sitar sound, with resounding bass notes and a delicate touch, as he improvises within the framework of the raga. (6:50)

 

2. ‘An Introduction to Indian Music’ from Sounds of India (1957)

 

A short spoken introduction, with demonstrations on sitar, tanpura and tabla. Recorded on Ravi’s first US album. Gives us a sense of how earnestly and engagingly he played the role of pioneer, educating his new audiences but trusting them to listen with open minds. (4:08)

 

3. ‘Pather Panchali Music Scene 1, Take 1’ (1955) from Milestones

 

Ravi’s exquisite folk-influenced score to Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Pather Panchali was composed and recorded in Calcutta in one night. Abjuring songs in favour of expressive incidental music using Indian instruments, it revolutionised Indian film music. This is the much loved main theme. The film, and its sequels in the Apu Trilogy, put Indian art cinema on the global map and made Ravi a sought-after soundtrack composer in India and abroad. (2:04)

4. ‘Sanwarey, Sanwarey’ from soundtrack to Anuradha (1960)

 

When Ravi switched to the challenge of writing songs for commercial cinema, he still rooted them in Indian classical music. On this lover’s urgent paean to Krishna, the singer is the unsurpassed queen of Bollywood song, Lata Mangeshkar. The film, a loose adaptation of Madame Bovary, won India’s National Film Award that year. (3:06)

 

5. ‘Medley: All India Radio Signatures’ (c.1949–56) from Milestones

 

India’s post-Independence radio boom made Ravi a national star in the early 1950s. He wrote these two pieces then as signature tunes for All India Radio, where he was director of music. The evocative first one, played here on the shehnai (an oboe-like reed instrument with auspicious associations), is based on his famous melody for the song ‘Sare Jahan Se Acchha’. In 1976 he rearranged it to become the theme of India’s national TV station, Doordarshan. (1:56)

 

6. ‘Dhun Kafi’ from In London ­(1962)

 

Kafi is a springtime raga, associated with the Holi festival and the romance between the gods Krishna and Radha, a favourite theme of Ravi’s. Here he plays it in the light classical thumri style, with tabla accompaniment by Kanai Lal. This recording, one of Ravi’s own favourites, is the likely inspiration for George Harrison’s Beatles song ‘Love You To’ (on Revolver), which was based on the same raga and recorded shortly before the two met in 1966. Both tracks open with an arpeggio on the sitar’s sympathetic strings, and the melodic resemblance is closest between 2:30 and 3:05 here. (12:38)

7. ‘Tabla Dhwani’ from Portrait of Genius (1965)

 

The album Portrait of Genius is a fine example of how Ravi raised the profile of percussionists, previously the poor relations of Indian classical music. Under Ravi’s direction, ‘Tabla-Dhwani’ features three tabla players, the masterful Alla Rakha taking the lead and improvising freely, with flute accompaniment by Paul Horn. Absorbing in its deceptive simplicity. (4:53)

 

8. ‘Raga Piloo’ (with Yehudi Menuhin) from West Meets East Vol. 2 (1968)

 

After hearing Ravi play sitar in Delhi in 1952, superstar violinist Yehudi Menuhin became his great early champion in the West. In this duet, premiered in a historic recital in the UN General Assembly in 1967, sitar and violin trade melodic riffs in Ravi’s characteristic call-and-response style. He wrote most of Menuhin’s lines to sound like they were improvised. The duo’s hugely successful West Meets East albums pioneered duets between virtuosos from different traditions. (14:40)

 

9. ‘Morning Love’ (with Jean-Pierre Rampal) from West Meets East Vol. 3 (1977)

 

Although Ravi was renowned for his collaborations, they usually took place on his own turf: he was the composer, and the music was based on Indian ragas and talas, avoiding what we now term fusion. Here the flautist Rampal duets with Ravi in a foray into light-classical territory, with Alla Rakha on tabla. Billboard called it ‘one of the most striking musical unions ever conceived’. (12:13)

10. Sitar Concerto No. 2, ‘Raga Mala’: 3rd Movement (1982)

 

Early experiments with orchestrating Indian instruments led on to major works for Western orchestras: three sitar concertos, a symphony and an opera. When Ravi wrote his 2nd concerto, conductor Zubin Mehta told him, ‘Make it difficult. Like hot chilli’, and he did. It featured complex rhythmic cycles and thirty ragas, and it was a triumph. This 3rd movement encompasses both divine lyricism and thrilling drama, as Ravi’s sitar shares the spotlight with a virtuoso trumpet solo, rousing timpani and a jazz-infused clarinet solo. His daughter Anoushka Shankar has revived it and today plays it regularly with leading orchestras. (14:32)

 

11. ‘Friar Park’ from Tana Mana (1987)

 

Starts out meditative and ends up in a hypnotic trance, Ravi’s sitar weaving a spell with marimba, tabla, and George Harrison playing autoharp (and producing). Named after Harrison’s home, where it was recorded, this exploration of the South Indian raga Charu Keshi is from the experimental 1987 album Tana Mana, on which Ravi embraced emulators and synthesizers. (5:55)

 

12. ‘Prashanti’ from Passages by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass (1990)

 

Several times in Ravi’s later music there is a three-part narrative structure that he named Dream, Nightmare and Dawn, in which carefree utopia gives way to conflict and catastrophe, before hope arrives of a better future. It reflected his own life experiences and outlook, and he deploys it here on this track from his album collaboration with Philip Glass. The final six minutes are perhaps his finest moment of all on record: a heartfelt devotional appeal for peace, sung first by Ravi himself, with heartbreaking tenderness, and then by the South Indian playback singer S. P. Balasubramanyam, against a spare ensemble arrangement that creates an otherworldly sense of calm. (13:38)

13. ‘Prabhujee’ from Chants of India (1997)

 

Ravi often talked of how in his musical and spiritual quest he was striving for a perfection that was tantalisingly out of reach. That sense of yearning for the infinite means his finest music often balances on a razor’s edge between bliss and melancholy. In this devotional song from his final collaboration with George Harrison, who is on guitar and producing, Ravi and his wife Sukanya appeal in the Hindi lyric to ‘Prabhujee’ (God, or perhaps a lover), to ‘Fill this empty pot with the nectar of your love.’ Although it is a song of longing, the feeling it creates is one of the tenderest love, an indication that this time he had managed to grasp that elusive heaven. (8:05)

 

14. ‘Raga Kedara’ from The Living Room Sessions, Part 1 (2012)

 

Aged 91, he recorded his last two albums at home, ‘fooling around’ on sitar along with Tanmoy Bose, latterly his regular touring tabla accompanist. The result was an intimate, close-miked snapshot of his late-period inventiveness, the fruits of a lifetime. His fingers may not move quite as adroitly as in his heyday, but this playful rendition of Raga Kedara, from the Grammy-winning first volume, shows how fertile his mind was to the last. (4:47)

 

15. ‘Dhun’ from Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival (1967)

 

Playing Monterey Pop in 1967 marked the arrival of Indian music into the Western mainstream. Ravi’s three-hour set, accompanied on tabla by Alla Rakha, closed with this dhun in one of his own ragas, Pancham Se Gara. It has an emotional crescendo and such an ecstatic climax that when D. A. Pennebaker cut his famous documentary of the festival, he realised that the only place to put this sequence was at the end of the film. Nothing could follow it. (19:41)

Image at top: Ravi Shankar (right) watching a playback while recording the music for Satyajit Ray’s film Aparajito in Calcutta, 1956.