ANOUSHKA SHANKAR

‘Three chapters, three geographies,’ Shankar scribbled in a diary at a café in Goa on New Year’s Day two years ago, manifesting an ambitious trilogy that she hoped would span multiple geographies with nods to her roots, across continents and collaborators. Looking back now, it’s safe to say that the 11-time GRAMMY Award nominee has outdone herself. Chapter I was recorded in Berlin acknowledging Shankar’s European heritage (she was born and lives in London), while Chapter II was captured in California, where she moved aged 11 and lived for over 15 years. Central to Chapter III is the mindfulness of India at the root of all her music. Shankar studied Indian Classical music in a deeply immersive fashion from her father Ravi Shankar. She also attended the British School in New Delhi as a kid. But it was only later as a teenager – when she found herself surrounded by friends from the music and fashion scene – that she forged more personal connections with the people and the land. This included a fascination for Goa Trance – India’s electronic music export to the rest of the world. In her twenties, Shankar escaped to the beach state to disappear from her touring and public life every New Year’s. She chased dance floor epiphanies in secret forest raves, participating with wild, youthful abandon, accompanied by its sibling feelings of positivity, hope, connection and joy. Think Inside Out: Millennial Goa Psy Edition. That sets the template for Chapter III, where Shankar also holds steadfast in her desire to work with a different producer on each mini-album. Here, that responsibility falls to London-based, Indian multi-instrumentalist Sarathy Korwar, one of the most original and compelling voices in the British jazz scene. Shankar also decided that Korwar would help to ground the release and round out the symbolism around working with the album’s third key collaborator, composer and sarod player Alam Khan, son of the famed Indian classical guru, Ali Akbar Khan. Let’s shift the weight of history out of the room first: Anoushka Shankar and Alam Khan belong to two of India’s most legendary – there’s really no other word for it – musical families. Their fathers, Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, were both renowned disciples of the legendary guru Baba Alauddin Khan (he is regarded as one of India’s greatest ever musicians). They trained side-by-side within the rigorous Maihar gharana tradition. Their electrifying, soul-stirring performances set a foundation in Indian music history, soundtracking the emergence of a fledgeling nation. Shankar and Khan established their own influential legacies, developing a unique vocabulary for their respective instruments. Anoushka and Alam have witnessed this swirl of Indian classical and contemporary music history at close quarters. They’ve known, or at the very least, contemplated at an early age that this moment would arrive when they’d have to broach the C word (collaboration): think of it as a carefully nuanced coming-of-age musical narrative, at least in the eyes of their late fathers. Chapter III goes beyond the portraits of the spaces their fathers occupy. It’s circling back to and honouring their roots without being overshadowed by them. Daybreak, the opening song, sets the joyful tone with its repeating grooves and rhythms, for the listener to really sit in that celebration. It’s the upward curve of an emotional cycle, moving into a new space where old triggers have lost their impact. Hiraeth, the first song the trio worked on together, features looping melodies and backwards sarod lines, an idea seeded by Khan and developed with Korwar and Shankar. For keen listeners, it features an Easter egg in the form of Raga Palas Kafi, created by Ravi Shankar. Similarly, Dancing on Scorched Earth sees the artists locking into each other’s rhythms, radiating a collective intensity built on a foundation of hypnotic simplicity. “I discovered my love of a POG pedal on this track to really enjoy that lower octave crunchiness on my sitar,” says Shankar. On Chapter III, Shankar fully embraces these kinds of techniques. Looping and bending sound through technology has enabled her to add another dimension to her voice. Shankar has been pushing and reclaiming a distinctly Indo-futurist vision of the sitar. She operates outside of Western definitions of ‘neoclassical’ and even further away from sub-continental norms of ‘fusion’, a dated, catch-all banner for collaborative, experimental music. We Burn So Brightly picks up the heat from Dancing on Scorched Earth – it’s the energy of alchemy that burns through the heat of the morning to bring about change through the act of dancing, shouting and movement. The trilogy closes with We Return to Love, based on one of Shankar’s favourite ragas, Manj Khamaj, played on a beautiful major scale with a twinge of nostalgia. It was made famous by Shankar and Khan’s fathers who famously concluded many concerts and recordings with it. This is where the story ends, where the music returns to ancestral echoes while carving a path for modern Indian sounds, where all three artists step into a space of deep-rooted celebration. If the lasting image of Forever, For Now is the memory of that enchanting afternoon in Shankar’s garden, her son drowsy in her lap, We Return to Light’s final frame is of someone stepping out from a forest rave into the quietude of a shoreline. The feeling is a mix of nostalgia and renewal. It echoes Shankar’s journey through those Goa raves where all you could do was follow a sign and a person, except it’s now Shankar who is signposting the listener. In We Return to Light, our feet meet the water, marking the end of a journey, a return to love, and a place of rest—a perfect, radiant conclusion to the trilogy.