Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar gave up dancing at eighteen to spend seven years living with a teacher and practising the sitar, and forty years later was explaining to rock festivals that tuning up was not the performance. He was born in Varanasi and raised largely in Paris in his brother Uday's celebrated dance troupe, touring Europe and America as a boy. In 1938 he left it for the traditional guru-shishya discipline under Allauddin Khan at Maihar, which meant austerity, family life in the teacher's household, and years of scales. He became music director of All India Radio, founded the National Orchestra, and wrote the scores for Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy. From the mid-1950s he toured the West seriously, and after George Harrison became his student in 1966 he was suddenly a celebrity in a context he found uncomfortable - he disliked being received as psychedelia and said so. He organised the Concert for Bangladesh with Harrison in 1971. He wrote concertos for sitar and orchestra, collaborated with Menuhin and Glass, and served in the Indian upper house. Both his daughters, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones, are musicians. His performance at Monterey in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969 put Indian classical music in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands, and he later said Woodstock horrified him. He won five Grammy awards, including one posthumously. Philip Glass worked with him transcribing music for Chappaqua in 1965 and said it changed how he understood rhythm. He composed for Gandhi and for Ray, and wrote two concertos for the London Symphony Orchestra. He was given the Bharat Ratna, India s highest civilian award, in 1999. He performed his last concert in California four weeks before he died at ninety-two.

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