Anoushka Shankar Celebrates Two Decades of Recording with ‘Reflections’ (interview)

This year is shaping up to be a year to remember for Anoushka Shankar. The musician recently issued the compilation Reflections,which chronicles her two decades as a recording artist. It also spotlights collaborations with Norah Jones, Nitin Sawhney, Vanessa Redgrave, Karsh Kale, and Alev Lenz. She has also said that the collection serves as a kind of homage to her father, the late sitar master Ravi Shankar.

There is constant touring, including the second leg of a North American run on the horizon that will pick up on 17 April and run through 5 May. During those dates, she will share the stage with Ojas Adhiya (tabla), Pirashanna Thevarajah (mridangam), Ravichandra Kulur (flute), Danny Keane (cello, piano), and Kenji Ota (tanpura).

There have been select live performances of her film score, Shiraz, at Dublin’s National Concert Hall and London’s Royal Festival Hall and, in mid-May she will perform at Philharmonie de Paris, undertaking a performance of Passages,a collaboration between her father and Philip Glass. In June, she returns to perform Land of Gold at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, and other venues.

Shankar is a thoughtful conversationalist, reflecting on her past accomplishments while clearly keen to move forward with her music and projects. Film scoring, she says, is one thing she’d like to do more of. And audiences on this current tour, she adds, will often get more than ruminations on old favorites. There is new music in the works, which she’s only too happy to share with fans along the way.

Shankar spoke with PopMatters from her home in London.

You curated this collection, Reflections. Did you have a particular method for organizing it?

I found it kind of challenging because, obviously, you can make choices based on any number of criteria. I did one version that was overly mellow, kind of the dinner table version. It had all of my sleepiest, slowest songs. I did another one that was a bit more energetic, which required more focus and active listening. I struggled to pin myself down to either of those. Eventually, I went for a more emotional arc. I chose songs that I felt had some kind of depth and weight.

In a sense, it was like creating an entirely new album.

For me, it was like going through a high school yearbook. It was interesting because it’s not something that I do very often. I was able to stop for a moment and go, “Wow, I have been making albums for 20 years.” It’s an amazing gift to have that. It’s very normal when making albums, to think of a journey or story. But I’ve never stopped to think, “Is there a story across my albums?”

Were there things you heard that surprised you about how you composed or performed 10 or 15 years ago?

I think I was surprised in good and bad ways. [Laughs.] There were things where I looked back and thought, “Maybe I would do that differently now.” I don’t know if this is common for other people, but there can be a tendency to underwrite past projects. You can say, “Oh, I’ve grown, therefore this one must be better and this is better and I didn’t do that well enough.” In some ways, I was pleasantly surprised to go back and say, “Oh, no, it was just different. I wouldn’t make the same album now but I like what that’s saying.” It was nice to warm to my old self in a way and be a bit kinder.

I do think we can be dismissive of earlier work and not recognize the good that was going on there.

We all keep changing. I started really young. So, for my first three albums, I’m literally going back and hearing myself as a teenager. That’s a bit painful for me! [Laughs.] I do think I can hear genuine growth in my playing. I would want to replay that stuff now in a way that I think is better. I don’t think I play as well at 16 as I do now.

You mentioned the idea of a story across your albums. Did you find a thread, or series of threads, along the way?

I did and I didn’t. I did in the sense that I seem to keep choosing hope and optimism as a way to conclude. I’m very attracted, as an artist, to moving into darkness and expressing that. But I want to do that in the context of catharsis and ultimately turn toward hope. I can see in a lot of my albums that they end with a lullaby or a song of reunion and reconnection. I tend to leave people and leave myself with an uplift.

I’m guessing that this was something that also influenced the live shows to a degree.

I’m not playing a huge amount from the compilation. However, I have used it as a springboard to look back. I am playing some old material, just not necessarily from the compilation. On the whole, it’s about looking back and seeing where the mood takes me. I didn’t want to be on the road playing only old material because that feels like a death knell. A good portion of the show is new music, unreleased stuff that I’ve been working on.

You’ve also performed some music from your score to the film Shiraz.

That was a wonderful opportunity. It’s a beautiful silent film from India, made in 1927. It was one of the first films ever made in India. It’s very grand, epic, a fictionalized account of the love story that led to the building of the Taj Mahal. Epic costumes, epic location, huge cast, 10,000 extras. The British Film Institute chose it as part of their annual film restoration in 2017 as part of their annual film festival. They commissioned me to write the score for it.

We played the live score in front of the film that year. I’ve just done that again in London and Dublin. It’s an hour and 47 minutes worth of music, that’s new for me. I enjoyed it very much but I’m not used to the idea that I write as a composer, then make a soundtrack. I was happy to take it and turn it into a standalone suite of music.

Does that open the door for you to do more film projects?

I hope so. The idea of composing music that I don’t necessarily have to tour behind for two years lends itself well to single parenting. [Laughs.] It’s also exciting, working in response to the visual medium.

Were you a lover of film before you undertook the first score?

I love film! I’ve been attracted to one day writing for film for a long time. But I’ve been a recording and touring musician so there was never space. I would get offers now and then but film works with a surprisingly shorter turnaround than music in a lot of ways, so I’d get offers for something very lovely but wouldn’t have time. This time, everything aligned itself beautifully and so I’m actively looking to create more space to be able to say yes to film projects at this point.

You also have a performance of music from Passages, the album your father recorded with Philip Glass, in Paris this summer.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I’ve performed it before, without Philip, in 2017. That was a manic year. The album Passages is so dear to me. It’s an album that Philip and my dad made when I was around nine. I have really fond and vivid memories of being in the studio through a lot of the process. I knew lots of the music by heart. But I also loved it on a musical level. It’ one of my favorite examples of collaboration. Cross-cultural or otherwise. The opportunity to be in the music, sit on the stage in the middle of an orchestra, and play this music live is just thrilling. I love it.

And you’re going to perform at Bonnaroo.

[Laughs.]

That’s really something.

That’s been on my radar for a while. It’s obviously a very different show. That’ll focus on the album Land of Gold, which came out in 2016. We’ve been touring pretty intensely with it since then. I’m really glad that it continues to come up and we can do another mini-tour with it because it is probably my personal favorite show. It’s probably the best example of me translating an album to the stage.

How have you seen your audience change across these last two decades?

There’s been a generational shift. That’s really fascinating. There are people who are visually the same age as I maybe would have seen 10-20 years ago but they say things to me like, “I first heard you when I was in high school,” or “I grew up listening to you.” I say, “What?” [Laughs.] The story has shifted. I’m a different age than when I started. Now I see a lot of my peers that are in the audience as opposed to people that are older than me.

Occasionally now I get new listeners who didn’t necessarily come to me through my father, for example. That happens a lot more now than it used to. I feel like when I first started my audience was almost entirely people who learned of me through my dad.

Can you talk a little bit about the cross-cultural collaborations you’ve done?

I’ve always sought that out. I see it as an opportunity to learn and grow and connect on a personal level through music. There’s a really electrifying and validating feeling of connection that happens. You stumble past those initial differences and find the way to play together. It’s magical. I also love about what that says about how we can connect through our differences and across barriers and I think music, in particular, is a lovely way to leap across barriers.

In a way, it’s through the back door because it bypasses your mental differences and argumentative stumps and all the things that two people who are in an audience might find to differentiate themselves from each other. But through music, they’re able to sit and have a similar emotional response to something, from a place of heart and empathy. I think that’s really beautiful.