Anoushka Shankar's Sitar Evolution: The Echoes Podcast

Anoushka Shankar has released an impressive trilogy of EPs in the last year that take her sitar in different directions. Chapter I: Forever For Now; Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before the Dawn; and Chapter III: We Return to Light, find Shankar in 3 different settings: World Fusion, Ambient and Improvisation. She also has three different producers including Pakistani-American singer and producer, Arooj Aftab. Over the last 2 decades or so Anoushka has found her own path in the music world that draws on the traditions her father, sitarist Ravi Shankar taught as well as his sense of experimentation. She’s taking the sitar in such new directions that sometimes you don’t know it’s a sitar at all.

Anouska Shankar: So suddenly I could play one note and have it ring for 50 seconds and then become more orchestral than I usually am as a lead instrument, because I can layer these long, long 50 second reverb notes and think in that way where I’m creating a bed of sound.

Anoushka Shankar. She could’ve just been a classical Indian sitarist, but she was brought up on pop and EDM music as well as Indian classical. She talks about it with John Diliberto in the Echoes Podcast.