...while Shankar family plays Hill

By Ben Oxenburg

Daily Arts Writer

The music hits you like a powerful, consuming vacuum. It takes you on a spiritual journey of self-discovery. It absorbs you like a clean hungry sponge. It suspends you in a bubble like state, leaving you floating like a thick, slowly dissipating cloud of smoke.

On Friday night at Hill Auditorium, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar and daughter Anoushka gave the audience some world music, culture and spirituality in two short sets. As the soft, light sounds of the sitar reverberated off the walls of the acoustically perfect Hill, the audience seemed to acknowledge with their respectfulness and amazement that they were witnessing something special. Perhaps witnessing is the wrong word. The audience was not simply a spectator during Friday's performance, they interacted and mentally connected with the musicians to produce a mood which was specific and uniquely crafted for that night.

The first set of the night consisted of five musicians seated on a raised platform in an X formation with Anoushka Shankar positioned in the center. Ravi Shankar didn't collaborate with his daughter until the second set. The two tabla players, Bikram Ghosh and Tanmoy Bose, sat in front of Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, who sat in the middle.

This formation not only allowed Anoushka to showcase her talents (at the young age of 19) but it also let the sitar be the instrument that provided the foundation to the songs, which themselves lasted anywhere between five and 20 minutes. The tablas, instead of offering stability and support from underneath, added texture, depth and layers to the music with their assorted clicks and echoes.

The powerful and enveloping music only needed amplification from a few small speakers. Much of the songs performed were composed in a style which incorporates the idea of talas, which means rhythmic circle. The songs are based on cycles of beats (either six, seven, ten, twelve, fourteen or sixteen), which reappear constantly in different forms. These give all of the songs a wonderful hypnotic quality of contrivance and ever-increasing spontaneity that led the audience to full attention. A visual form of the music would likely resemble a circle that undulates and inflates while still retaining its original shape.

A few songs were veritable climaxes, beginning with a single plucking or tabla resonation and ending with a multitude of sounds, all in-sync and colliding together. Although the first set was outstanding with an Anoushka solo, the highlight of Friday's show was the second set, when the musicians were joined by Ravi and where it was clear that everyone on stage felt a little more experimental with his new presence.

This set also featured many tradeoffs and duels between musicians. This not only added to the interest and excitement, but it is also one, rather effective way of facilitating spontaneous behavior.

Perhaps there was no mistake in choosing the heading of "Full Circle" for the Ravi and Anoushka Shankar tour. With the first set, the musicians opened the circle to enlighten and intrigue and include the audience, and only with the addition of Ravi to the stage did the circle become closed, full and complete.

Courtesy of ravishankar.org

Legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar performed with his daughter Anoushka at Hill on Friday.