The sitar maestro passed away at age 92 in San Diego Tuesday night. The legendary musician was India’s classical music ambassador, and is known for bringing traditional Indian music to Western audiences. Shankar remained an active musician until his final days, and was even nominated this year for a Grammy. Shankar—who is also musician Norah Jones’s father—was admitted to the hospital last Thursday after complaining of breathing difficulties.
In 1966 the Indian musician met Beatle George Harrison, who became his most famous disciple and gave the musician-composer unexpected pop-culture cachet. Harrison labeled Shankar "the godfather of world music."In New Delhi, the Inidan prime minister's office confirmed Shankar's death and called him a “national treasure.”
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 the 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.
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 Yahudi 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.
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.
When Jones shot to stardom and won five Grammy awards in 2003, Anoushka Shankar, his heir on the sitar, 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.”