Instrumentalists: And Now the Sitar

It was more a musical séance than a concert. “The air was hazy with the acrid aroma of burning incense. The three barefoot musicians sat cross-legged on an Oriental rug onstage. The audience at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium last week was equally exotic—a curious mingling of Indians in turbans or saris, bearded jazz musicians, leather-jacketed beatniks and college students. Racing his spidery fingers across the steel strings of his sitar, Ravi Shankar invoked a whining chorus of quavering, sensuous melodies in intricate interplay with the shifting, galloping cross-rhythms of the tablet (drums). Soaring above the metallic drone of an unfretted lute called a tamboura, Shankar finished in a furious display of virtuosity that brought a cheering ovation from the audience.

At 44, Shankar is India’s most famed traditional musician. In the past half-dozen years, through a series of recordings and globe-girdling tours, Shankar has proved to jazz fans that his improvisational flights have an exciting kinship to modern jazz. Joy, Eroticism. Part of the appeal is the extraordinary range of sounds that can be coaxed out of the awkward- looking sitar, from deep guttural sighs to piercing cries. Fashioned 700 years ago, the sitar has six or seven playing strings, 19 “sympathetic” resonating strings, so sensitive that they must be retuned while being played, and two bulbous gourds at either end for sound boxes. Shankar’s sitar artistry has influenced such jazz innovators as Pianist Dave Brubeck and Saxophonists John Coltrane and Bud Shank. At the end of his U.S. tour, Shankar will begin a six- week course in Indian music at U.C.L.A.; local jazzmen are standing in line to enroll. The basis of Indian music is a melodic form called a raga, a series of notes on which the musician improvises. There are thousands of ragas, each conveying a specific mood—joy, eroticism, loneliness, etc. Says Saxophonist Shank: “Everybody says how free our music is, but in comparison with Indian music we are terrifically restricted. It’s endless what a musician like Ravi can do.” Transported. Shankar began as a dancer with the famed Indian troupe headed by his brother, Uday Shankar. At 18, he disposed of all his worldly possessions and settled in a remote village to study the devilishly difficult sitar with a guru. He practiced slavishly 14 hours a day for seven years before he felt ready to perform professionally. Shankar finds the concert circuit a bit frustrating because of the restrictions of time. The real joy of improvising on a raga, which he says is a form of yoga, is to play as long as the spirit moves him. This can mean hours, even days. Though he consciously holds himself in check while on tour, at a concert in Manhattan three years ago he became “completely transported” and plucked away until 4 a.m. “The audience stayed right with me,” he says proudly.