Anoushka Shankar on tradition and innovation

The Innovation Award at last week's Classical IVORs went to sitar virtuoso, composer and activist Anoushka Shankar, whose extraordinary career has encompassed collaborations with musicians as diverse as Herbie Hancock, Rostropovich, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Sting as well as championing her father Ravi's works for sitar and orchestra, and composing for film and TV.

In the lead-up to the ceremony, Anoushka sat down with me to discuss her earliest musical memories, how she navigated performance anxiety and commercial pressures in the wake of becoming famous at a young age, why carving out time to be 'silly and messy' in her twenties played such an important role in unlocking her own authentic voice, and the joy of taking her father's legacy into bold new musical worlds...

As someone who grew up in an atmosphere filled with music, when did you first feel drawn to it yourself?

It’s hard to pinpoint, but I think my earliest memories are of my mum giving me quick mini singing lessons with her tiny harmonium before school when we were living in Willesden. She took me to lots of concerts of North and South Indian classical music at a wonderful cultural centre in West London called The Bhavan: they do summer schools for kids, and for a lot of south Asian families they’re so central to staying connected to our arts culture and classical dance forms. 

But it was the piano which first drew me in – if we went to someone’s house and they had a piano I would feel such a strong urge to play. My dad was my only guru but another important figure in my life was Penny Estabrook, who taught me piano: she’d learned Indian music with my father and they were very close. 

The sitar came to me, because of my father; family discussions about whether I would want to play began when I was around seven. I was kind of ambivalent about it. There was something exciting about being let into that world, but also a weight of expectation which kept me away…

Music and the arts were so intrinsic to our family life. I think I was always aware that these lovely people coming over for dinner were also great artists, because my parents would put them into context for me. I was also the kind of kid that was dragged along to everything – my half-sister [Norah Jones] lived with her mother at that point, so I was raised as an only child, staying up late and being very involved in my parents’ world.

Did any of those great artists offer you career-advice once you became a part of that world in your own right?

All the musicians around me were very supportive when I started out, but George Harrison was the person who would draw me aside whenever he could and say ‘How’s it going, are you OK? Let me know if the pressure feels too much’. George was uniquely placed to offer me that kind of care and support: he had the experience of learning Indian classical music with my father, and also knew what it was to be thrust into the spotlight at a young age.

He spoke to my parents a lot about this, and was very aware that nobody knew what fame would look like for this new generation…Mum and dad were doing their best to give me balance, but it meant a lot to have an uncle figure who cared about my well-being rather than saying ‘You’re going to continue your father’s legacy!’.

Did you ever experience performance anxiety in the light of that ‘weight of expectation’?

I think I hit forty before I realised I was anxious. We didn’t have the language for so many things back then: today’s culture of wellness was still a long way off, and if things looked good on the outside then people were less concerned about what was going on underneath. I can say now that I used to be filled with absolute terror as a show day approached – my heart would be racing, I couldn’t speak, and I often felt paralysed.

But there were always moments which I really enjoyed, and the exhilaration after a concert was incredible. The experience of playing with my father on stage was very particular – I started out as part of his ensemble, which is a very traditional thing for us. It wasn’t a one-off because I was his daughter: so many of his disciples played alongside him before moving into their solo careers, just as he did with his guru.

It’s an integral part of how we learn stagecraft and how to think on our feet, almost like putting a music lesson on stage. The stakes are slightly higher when you’re doing it in front of thousands of people, but the essence was still my father throwing out ideas for me to respond to - and it was way less scary than making a two-hour debut on my own!

I started opening concerts for him when I was about fifteen, partly because of his age and partly because of increasing interest in me – I’d play the first hour solo, then accompany him. That felt terrifying because I knew everybody was waiting for him, and internally I was apologising for taking up their time! But it was an incredible stepping-stone and taught me a lot about finding comfort on stage alone. I started touring solo when I was eighteen, and the anxiety kicked in again…but it was all part of my evolution as a performer, and I’m happy to have got to a place where I can share my absolute love of being on stage. It’s usually a deeply comfortable, trusting act now. 

At what stage did you feel you’d found your own distinct identity as an artist?

As a teen - even into my early twenties - I was more afraid of risk than desirous of development. I’d been raised in this very classical tradition and felt the weight of presenting that, so the idea of stepping outside was scary. There was a lot of interest in me when I was in my late teens, because there was nobody out on the international music circuit who was young, female and South Asian. I remember meeting Richard Branson at a dinner, and him saying to my parents ‘I don’t care what instrument she plays, just let me sign her!’. 

There was another famous producer in New York who said ‘There is no South Asian superstar, and we can make her one…but can she sing a bit too? She doesn’t have to sing well!’ Stuff like that was coming at me all the time, and it just made me fearful – I didn't want to sing, it felt weird!

So I held back rather than stepping forward. I got to a point where I was feeling deeply stuck, because as much as I loved the music I was playing, I began to recognise that I was experiencing a real disconnect between it and me. On stage I felt that I was putting on a character in order to present this beautiful thing that I had learnt, rather than playing from my soul as I saw other people doing...

That’s when I realised I needed a break. I had to fight a bit to stop touring for a year, and I created enough space in my life to try out silly, messy, young recording experiments.  I suppose it was a kind of ‘sabbatical’, but in the back of my head I thought ‘maybe something will happen in the break…’ - and it did! Things were relatively newly digital at that point – my first three albums were recorded on tape, so suddenly to be able to just cut things and move them around felt very freeing. I’d call friends over to mess around, and all of that turned into my fourth album RISE. I see that album as my first baby, because it was self-produced, and that’s when I woke up as a musician in a different way.

I knew that I could learn a lot from my peers who were DJing and playing non-classical music and weren’t so fearful of doing something ‘wrong’ or disrespectful. That very reverent approach isn’t inherently how classical music is, but it’s how I personally absorbed it – there were moments of great freedom and joy, but also a weight of tradition which I found very creatively inhibiting.

Around that time, I remember my godmother asking me where I kept my sitar. When I was home I would keep it in the prayer-room, next to my dad’s, and she gently suggested that there would be nothing disrespectful about moving it to my bedroom…That got me thinking about making friends with my instrument, as I would see my friends with guitars doing – their instrument would be leaning casually against the wall and they’d just pick it up when the mood took them, whereas I would sit down To Practise, almost like a ritual. I had to consciously change that relationship in order to free myself up. 

What happened once you shifted that dynamic?

My first three records were all music I’d learned from my father, although I improvised around it a little on my third. RISE was my first attempt at writing for myself, and I had no confidence that I knew how to do that: here I was with a very successful career, and I was terrified that I’d expose myself as a fraud if it turned out that underneath it all I just…couldn’t write.

In hindsight it’s funny I thought that way, because so many musicians don’t compose – you can spend an entire career playing glorious repertoire by other people, especially in Western classical music. Indian classical music has always included improvisation, and that’s what I struggled with – putting down the safe things I knew and exposing something unfinished.

On RISE people created safe spaces for me to do that. One was my dad’s producer friend Alan Kozlowski (who lent me his studio in Los Angeles over the summer); another was my friend Gaurav Raina, who was part of an electronic duo called MIDIval Punditz out of Delhi and did a lot of production on the record. 

I had so much fun making that album. I brought in an incredible flamenco pianist called Pedro Ricardo Mino, and some sessions were honestly just us getting a bit tipsy and tapping on bottles with pencils or snapping soda-cans…I’d never allowed myself to be silly and messy as a musician before, and it was so creatively freeing.

This is why I always work hard to be disarming when I’m collaborating with new people: I function better when I’ve stripped away the formality and created a jokey, relaxed atmosphere. Sure, you get people who take that at face value and assume it means you’re going to know less and do less, but that’s on them: I can’t stride in on the front foot being a diva, and I’m at peace with that now.

Are there practical considerations to bear in mind when placing the sitar in an orchestral context?

My father’s orchestral works are fascinating because they have these improvised passages placed within the score where the soloist can jump off and do lovely free bits. I love playing his Concerto No. 2 in particular, and the Symphony (which was written for me). I learnt them all by ear - some directly from him and some from tape - and I’ve never used a score. For every orchestral piece of his or mine I have cheat-sheets with hit-points where I come in; I notate bar-numbers so I can communicate in rehearsal, but otherwise I’m either using Indian notation or just memory.

All that experience playing my dad’s work helped me understand how to place the sitar when I came to work with arrangers on my own compositions - for example my Chapters Trilogy, which we just did at the Proms with the London Contemporary Orchestra. We’re building on things my dad did, but pushing it forward: we like to be really driven and have a very full sonic soundscape.

Does that kind of soundscape usually require amplification?

I’m always mic’ed because the sitar is so quiet; when we were touring RISE I was up against drumkits and loud electronics, which was difficult. I worked with an instrument manufacturer to create the first internally mic’ed sitar, and that changed my life in a crossover space - now I have the freedom to go wherever my brain takes me!

In the last ten years I’ve started working with pedalboards, and that changed everything! With Land of Gold I created an album that had a very particular sound, with layered sitars; when it was time to think about presenting it live, my engineer and I got delay, reverbs and a loop station, which gave me more control to create a sonic landscape with my instrument. As someone who plays a melodic single-line instrument I tended to think in one layer, but being able to loop gave me the freedom to explore a more orchestral approach.

That fed into my later compositions, like my film soundtrack Shiraz where I have kickdrums. Sometimes my feet are almost as busy as my hands, and it’s really fun!