Will we ever get to hear such music?

KOLKATA: Ananda Shankar started synthesizing Indian and world instruments in 1969. Initially he feared that Kaka (Ravi Shankar) would be sceptical about what he had termed ‘World Music.’ But when he heard Ananda, he realised he wasn’t fooling around. Ananda presented him the album, ‘Ananda Shankar’, recorded in Los Angeles for Warner Bros. Later in 1989, he presented the album ‘2001’, so named to indicate that it’s the music of the next century.Again, when he recorded ‘Missing You’ for Baba, he first presented it to Kaka.
Ananda was a die-hard fan of Kaka’s music. He grew up listening to it, and knew he could not equal, let alone excel it. So he diverted himself to World Music. He was never a part of the interactions Kaka had with Yehudi Menuhin, Andre Previn or Philip Glass but he always collected each and every album that came out of such collaboration.
I first met Kaka in 1971, when Ananda took me to Jahajbari to listen to him play. I was about 13 then. Since then I’ve always attended his concerts, when he played in the Marble Palace, in Science City, in a jugalbandi or solo. That has generated an interest in and love for Indian raga music. His duets with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Allah Rakha seem like a dream now. Will we ever get to hear music of that level? I therefore treasure the memory of the evening in Delhi’s Kamani auditorium when I staged The Child in January. He not only sat through the entire evening, he lauded my work and blessed me for the production that was a tribute to Tagore in his 150th year.
As a person, he was deeply affectionate, always full of life, jocular, even childish in his interactions with his family. Although he was born in Benaras and raised away from Bengal, he always read Bengali books, listened to Bengali music, kept himself abreast of developments in Bengali literature by regularly subscribing to Bengali weeklies and journals – even in Santiago. And when he came to Kolkata, I would cook for him and take it across to the Ballygunge Park apartment of Vinay Bharatram (where he always put up). Be it aalu posto or laal shaak, he would polish it off without giving anyone a chance to realise whether it was well cooked or not!
He called up to bless my daughter Srinanda because he could not be present at her wedding. He considered it right as the head of the Shankar family when his brother was gone.
--Ananda Shankar