AS THE country moved towards a sense of normalcy this year, concerts and big hoo-ha events postponed some time ago came back into view.
For Anoushka Shankar, it meant a revived and slightly revamped Shankar 100 at the Southbank Centre in London. Originally scheduled for April 7 2020 – on the 100th anniversary of her great father sitarist’s birthday, it was postponed by a year but in 2021 another lockdown meant that plan had to be shelved too.
Finally, this March and just before going to press, Shankar 100 has been resurrected and will get properly under way.
Shankar has herself been busy – especially as playing live and in person became possible at the tail end of last year – both in the UK and wider afield. She was back in Berlin in November for Reflektor. This is a festival Anoushka curates and it celebrates Indian music.
She brought the likes of big Indian classical names such as Aruna Sairam, and Indrani Mukherjee and fellow British artists Soumik Datta (sarod) Bishi (singer-songwriter) and Nabihah Iqbal (guitar) to Reflektor and rounded off the long weekend of music with a concert on Sunday, November 7, marking the production of her latest album, Love Letters.
The creation of this album was something of a departure for the artist. Sometimes, from the depths of despair, artists find a creative outlet which forces them to take chances and expose their own vulnerability.
That Anoushka Shankar did this with Love Letters is a triumph of artistic enterprise.
Her album Love Letters was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Global Music Album category in 2021, and takes the total number of her Grammy nominations to seven in all.
She was also nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for her music for the TV series, A Suitable Boy, which screened on the BBC in 2021.
Love Letters was composed after the break-up of her seven-year marriage to British film director Joe Wright. It is an album about healing, finding the light in darkness and stepping out into the world again with a renewed sense of hope and optimism.
Moving to the new record label, Mercury KX, she told her new producers about one of the six emblematic tracks Lovable: “Am I still lovable, if you stop loving me? Am I enough, if you don’t want me? It’s the voice of that raw, aching, vulnerability inside us, the one we rarely articulate.”
Shankar also featured in the Dalai Lama’s first album which was released in the summer of 2020 s covid ravaged the world. His Inner World was his first ever recording and comes with an accompanying booklet and was issued to celebrate the holy figure’s 85th birthday.
Shankar plays on a track which honours mothers, Ama La.
She said it was a huge honour for her to contribute. She met the Dalai Lama first with father when she was young. “It (his voice) was very evocative with his speaking.
“It’s so clear what the mood is about…it kind of flowed quite simply to just play over that and try to add a musical enhancement to the words he’s speaking.”
A recipient of 2019’s Eastern Eye’s Arts Culture and Theatre Awards, she has raised her profile within the industry: she is the inaugural president of the F-List – a new directory that spotlights women musicians. Despite the industry being about 50 per cent female, few women headline at festivals or get the attention they deserve.
In addition, Shankar was an ambassador for The Walk, which was a charity initiative last year designed to draw attention to the plight of refugees. There was also a triumphant appearance at the BBC Proms (famously without an audience at The Royal Albert Hall) and her first.
This is an artist who isn’t scared to say what she is feeling and continues to have a wide emotional impact and draw on her humanitarian and feminist principles.
She said of the songs in Love Letters made with producer and vocal collaborator, Alev Lenz: “They’re really about rising through the pain, rather than shutting down.” Shankar was brought up in India, the UK and the US and started performing with her father when she was 13. She has two sons of her own with Wright.