BY INDIRA PRAHST

ANOUSHKA Shankar, a sitar virtuoso and composer who is deeply rooted in Indian classical music and weaves diverse musical genres into her music, hit the stage last weekend to a sold-out show at The Chan Centre for Performing Arts in Vancouver as part of a tour of her new album “Chapter 1- Forever, For Now.”

The instrumentalists who accompanied her were culturally diverse: Arun Ghosh (clarinet), Sarathy Kowar (drums), Pirashanna Thevarajah (Indian percussion) and Tom Farmer (bass).

Shankar thanked the audience and said, “We love it here! It’s the happiest drive from any airport of the tour so far today.”

The concert theme revolved around a range of compositions starting with her new album which fuses Indian classical music, Middle Eastern and jazz and opened with a new piece, “What will we remember?” She then performed music from her album Land of Gold with “socially conscious music” featuring pieces, “Boat to Nowhere” and “Secret Heart.” Both pieces evoked deep emotion through the instruments which echoed the sentiments of many worldwide amongst the chaos in the world and hope through music.

Other pieces from her new album that she played were, “Say your Prayers” and “Daydreaming,” lullabies she grew up with inspired by childhood memories which were soothing.

Shankar’s music continues to echo that of her late father, legendary virtuoso sitarist Ravi Shankar, where his spirit and teaching continue to imbue her work, but in new ways through her performance of “Fire Night,” which she explained in this way: “It is a piece of my fathers. I grew up loving this piece…. even though it’s one of his early sitar albums, it does not feature him playing. It’s a composition of his that features several other instruments and I always found it very strange, unusual, fun. And then, when I started playing with these amazing musicians as a group, it felt it’s a perfect place to take that piece and play with it.”

Shankar reworked it with a fusion of jazz, giving space for each one of the musicians to shine and to make beautiful music to an enraptured audience.

The event, as it did in the past, ended with a standing ovation demonstrating how much she touched the hearts of the audience, especially those who understood the difficulty and complexity of such music. Shankar returned to the stage alone, took the mic and spoke to the audience: “You guys make everything worth it!” and performed a piece from the new album, called “Stolen Moments,” with expansive ragas which she said is “about taking those precious moments when we can, whenever they come, just catch them, take them, feel them.” She finished with “Reunion” which is like a fantasy ending which Shankar said was an appropriate way to end the show.

In closing, the audience was truly mesmerized with the concert hall of amazing musical talents and the energy emitted from them, evidenced by the words of people after the concert: “This was the best event in my life so far.”

Indeed, Shankar’s journey to find innovative ways for the sitar to blend with different musical genres while keeping the legacy of Indian classical music continues to break barriers and “speak to timeless pasts and urgent futures.”