I don’t know how many giants of music were still mounting the concert stage at 88 years of age, but Ravi Shankar did once again last night at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. Performing with his daughter, Anoushka, who is substantially younger than 88 at 27 years old, Shankar once again enthralled the audience, taking them on a journey that included ancient evening ragas and “Yankee Doodle.”
Ravi Shankar
Shankar is frail now. He’s helped on stage by his assistant and tanpura player, Kenji Ota and he doesn’t sit cross-legged anymore. Instead, he rests at the edge of the riser, his feet on the floor as his assistant places the sitar in his lap. It’s a modified instrument that’s smaller with a flattened back and no head stock. As he settles into position, you wonder if he’ll be able to play at all. But once the music starts, Shankar steps into another world articulating a fractal forest, full of symetrical patterns and asymetrical melodies. As he bends into the alap, the opening, free movement of each piece, notes seem to unfold, slowly bending into microtonal curves. It’s when the gat, or rhythmic section kicks in, that you can hear the change in Shankar’s playing. He’s no longer the speed demon, scorching the frets in arabesque runs. Instead, he’s more like a road-worn blues musician, bending into notes, tossing out sketches of licks, placing points along the lines of the melody. Anoushka, on the other hand, is a speed demon, and while she took on a secondary role to her father, she stepped out on several fiery runs.
Anoushka Shankar
performance now that I don’t recall from earlier concerts. He said he’d be dropping in folk melodies into one raga. I expected that to mean Indian folk melodies, not “Yankee Doodle,” which popped in as kind of a Philadelphia homage. I wonder if he plays “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in California or “New York, New York” in that city?
