WOMAD

Ananda Shankar

From India

Sitar player Ananda Shankar was in the right place at the right time: America’s West Coast in the mid- to late sixties. He’d arrived there from India to study, but fell in with the hippie movement and met Jimi Hendrix. As the sitar was then the most fashionable of instruments – endorsed by the Stones and Beatles, popularised in the West by Ravi Shankar – Ananda Shankar was offered a record deal by Reprise, the home of Frank Sinatra and Neil Young. The ensuing album, ‘Ananda Shankar’, contained covers of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and ‘Light My Fire’ – a version that manages to be simultaneously hypnotic, fascinating and cheesy – and that was that as far as the West was concerned.But Ananda Shankar continued to make records on his return to India, blending the experimentation of the psychedelic era with his country’s classical tradition, using sarods and Stratocasters, tablas and drum kits: he was, in effect, exploring music in the way that, 25 years later, Asian artists in Britain would do. The album ‘Ananda Shankar and His Music’, released in the early seventies, was rediscovered by jazz and hip-hop producers in the nineties, eager to use unusual and undiscovered beats and breaks. Tracks such as ‘Dancing Drums’ and ‘Streets of Calcutta’ retain an extraordinarily fresh feel – they’re intense and manage to combine ragas with jazz and dance, almost as if George Clinton had been to Calcutta in his spaciest incarnation. And over the past two years, which have seen the rise of Talvin Singh and the Anokha stable of British Asian artists, Ananda Shankar’s music has found a new audience in another place, and in another time.This year’s WOMAD performance, featuring Shankar with British and Indian musicians for the first time, should provide some fascinating links between the sixties and the nineties, between psychedelia and drum'n'bass.