Ananda Shankar

A dancer's son

Ananda Shankar was born on 11 December 1942 in Almora, in what is now Uttarakhand. His parents were the dancers Uday and Amala Shankar, and his uncle was the sitarist Ravi Shankar. He went to the Scindia School in Gwalior, then studied sitar at Banaras Hindu University with Lalmani Misra, not with his uncle. In his fifth year there he rushed to San Diego, where his father had been taken ill, and he stayed on in the United States with Ravi Shankar, travelling with him.

Los Angeles

In the late 1960s Shankar was in Los Angeles, playing with rock musicians, Jimi Hendrix among them. Hendrix suggested they record together. Shankar declined, reasoning that "it wouldn't be my music." He made the album alone.

Ananda Shankar came out on Reprise in April 1970. Alex Hassilev, once of the Limeliters, produced it in the basement studio of his Hollywood home, with James Lowe, formerly the singer of the Electric Prunes, engineering. Apart from the tabla player Pranish Khan, the band was Western session players, including Jerry Scheff, bassist in Elvis Presley's touring group. Paul Lewinson played the Moog synthesizer and co-wrote most of the originals. Covers of Jumpin' Jack Flash and Light My Fire gave rock listeners something familiar, while the 13-minute Sagar (The Ocean) stayed closest to Indian classical playing. On the sleeve Shankar wrote that he dreamed of a new music joining Western and Indian forms, the sitar and the most modern electronic devices. The critic Richie Unterberger saw what set him apart: he came to the fusion from the Eastern side. The record did not take the world by storm, but collectors kept it alive, and it is one of the albums in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Calcutta

Shankar went back to Calcutta in January 1970, after fourteen months in the United States, and formed an orchestra. It made its public debut at the launch of the Calcutta edition of All India Radio's youth programme Yuv-vani, and Cyrus Tata and his band High Noon joined it. He scored films for the director Mrinal Sen, among them Calcutta 71 (1972), Padatik (1973) and Chorus (1974), which won him a National Award.

Ananda Shankar and His Music (1975) mixed sitar, rock guitar, tabla, mridangam, drums and Moog. It opens with Streets of Calcutta and closes with Dancing Drums. His concerts grew into what he called the Ananda Shankar Audio-Visual Experience, joining orchestra, dancers and lights. The albums that followed were largely soundtracks for those shows, among them A Musical Discovery of India (1978). Missing You (1977) was a tribute to his father. In the 1980s and early 1990s his music was on the state broadcaster Doordarshan, and his group performed at the closing ceremony of the Festival of the USSR in India in 1988 and the opening of the 1996 cricket World Cup.

Rediscovery

By the mid-1990s his early records were rare grooves in England, selling for hundreds of pounds, and Blue Note's 1996 compilation Blue Juice Vol. 1 included two tracks from the 1975 album. The DJ Sam Zaman, known as State of Bengal, played a seven-hour vinyl tribute to him at a club night. Alan James, who ran a club night and had come across the records, found he knew a friend of Shankar's at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, and brought him to Britain for rehearsals and a week-long tour. At the shows people handed him copies of the Reprise LP to sign. WOMAD booked the project and Real World took it into the studio during Recording Week, where nine tracks were recorded in a week.

Shankar returned to Kolkata with plans for a second album and a world tour. He died there on 26 March 1999, aged 56. Walking On, made with State of Bengal, was released in 2000. In his tribute James wrote that Shankar was "an original musician of the world before the term 'world music' was invented." Hariharan of Colonial Cousins and State of Bengal are among the artists his work influenced, and his Jumpin' Jack Flash has been admired by Beck and James Murphy.