Remember Shakti

Remembering Shakti

Remember Shakti takes its name from John McLaughlin's acoustic Indian-fusion band Shakti, formed in the 1970s after the Mahavishnu Orchestra with the tabla player Zakir Hussain, the violinist L. Shankar and the percussionist R. Raghavan. BBC Music Magazine says it made three albums and broke up in 1978; overgrownpath dates its formation to 1975 and The Week to 1973. Shakti is Sanskrit for power or the goddess of power. After a gap of about twenty years McLaughlin and Hussain reformed it in 1997. McLaughlin could not locate L. Shankar, so the bansuri player Hariprasad Chaurasia took his place, with T. H. Vikku Vinayakram on ghatam, for a UK tour and a debut album recorded live in England over four nights.

A second line-up formed around 1999 and 2000 with U. Srinivas on electric mandolin and V. Selvaganesh on percussion, with the singer Shankar Mahadevan joining and later becoming full-time. Time Out billed the pair in 2013 as celebrating their 40-year personal and musical relationship. Tours included Montreux in 1999 and July 2004, the Mumbai Festival at the Gateway of India in January 2005, December 2006 in Mumbai, an India tour in February 2012 and the London Jazz Festival on April 22, 2013.

The recordings are Remember Shakti (live, Verve, April 13, 1999), The Believer (October 3, 2000) and Saturday Night in Bombay, collected in a 2002 box set from Universal. The DVD The Way of Beauty, directed by Partho Sen-Gupta, adds a documentary, 55 minutes of Saturday Night in Bombay, a 2004 Paris sound-check and Montreux footage; PopMatters' Stuart Henderson gave it 8 of 10. Setlist.fm lists 42 setlists from 1997 to 2020. A later band simply called Shakti released This Moment in June 2023, which won Global Music Album at the 2024 Grammys. Zakir Hussain died in late 2024, aged 73.