As ephemeral as a curling wisp of burning incense, as intricate as chasing a thread through an elaborate piece of embroidery and as lovely as an unfolding flower, musician and composer Anoushka Shankar’s Home gathers to its center all the delicate beauty and labyrinthine complexities of Indian music’s classical raga.
With recordings like Traces of You, Traveller, Rise, Breathing under Water with musician, composer and producer Karsh Kale and Ravi & Anoushka Shankar Live in Bangalore with her late father the revered Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ms. Shankar has become one of the music world’s premier sitar players.
Stepping out from her father’s shadow, Ms. Shankar has dipped into worlds of acting and writing, stepped up as an advocate for animal rights, serves as a spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Program and is a fierce supporter of the One Billion Rising campaign to end crimes against women. Did I mention she already has eight solo recordings to her credit, as well as other musical collaborations with greats like Phillip Glass, Jethro Tull and Herbie Hancock?
Home is four tracks of utter sitar lushness with Ms. Shankar on sitar, Tanmoy Bose on tabla and Kenji Ota on bass and trable tanpura. Opening with “Alaap” from the first section entitled I. Guru: Raga Jogeshwari, Ms. Shankar lulls and soothes in this opulently lazy track where rests between notes seem almost as important as the notes themselves, like meditative reminders to wait and listen.
Gentle and wholly improvised, “Alaap” is a languorous trip down a slow-moving river and you will simply have to go where Ms. Shankar’s sitar note will take you. Slipping into “Jod, Jhala,” the rhythm takes over in a gentle pulse before winding into a tightly packed flurry of cascading notes. Closing out the first section, “Gat in Rupaktaal” introduces the tabla to create a heady mix.
The second section, entitled II. Celebration: Raga Manj Khamaj, consists of a single eighteen minute track called “Aochar, Dadra, Teentaal, Coda.” This closing track is an elegant, shimmering track that starts off gently before giving way to deeply lush sitar and tabla lines. Picking up the pace as the track progresses, sitar, tanpura and tabla radiate a barely repressed joyfulness in the music, giving fans a tabla solo and a depth of understanding of Ms. Shankar’s irrepressible skill as a sitar player and composer.
Home is a genuine delight for fans already addicted to the Indian raga and for new fans looking to expand their musical horizons.
Buy Home in North America
Buy Home in Europe
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
