Acclaimed as the godfather of world music, Ravi Shankar is both an orthodox and purist performer of Indian classical music and an experimenter, who throughout his long career has blended seemingly disparate genres of music together to create totally new expressive mediums.
Born into a Brahmin...
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Acclaimed as the godfather of world music, Ravi Shankar is both an orthodox and purist performer of Indian classical music and an experimenter, who throughout his long career has blended seemingly disparate genres of music together to create totally new expressive mediums.
Born into a Brahmin family in 1920, Shankar moved to a dazzling Paris in the '30s to perform in his older brother's dance company. Nine years later, he became the student of the great master Baba Allaudin Khan, and from his pampered life of five-star hotels and the glitterati, Shankar moved to a coconut-frond bed in Khan's simple compound and severe asceticism. Seven years of the master's strict discipline and tyrannical mentorship laid the foundation for Shankar's incandescent, international career.
His association with musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin, Jean Pierre Rampal, Zubin Mehta, Andre Previn, George Harrison, John Coltrane, Philip Glass, and others established ground-breaking trends and standards that have set him apart in the annals of classical and contemporary music.
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