Qwest TV is proud to announce Anoushka Shankar as its latest Guest Curator. Born into a musical family, the Shankar household was never quiet. Anoushka’s father, the great raga master Ravi Shankar, ensured that musicians had a permanent presence. As a result she grew up listening, learning, improvising, playing games and learning to express herself, especially on her father’s instrument, the sitar, which he taught her from the age of nine.
As a teenager she discovered electronic music and immersed herself in the Goan psychedelic trance scene, drawing parallels between the dancefloor and the meditative, introspective and ecstatic qualities of Indian classical music. By the age of 25 she had recorded three classical albums and performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Barbican multiple times. Through production and composition influenced by multiple cultures, Anoushka’s music offered a way of speaking her own history while growing up across continents, with one foot in the past and the other firmly in the present.
2005’s Rise brought her second Grammy nomination and marked a launchpad for a rich solo career, featuring turns from the likes of Sting, her father and her half-sister, Norah Jones. What followed over the next decade and a half was a fruitful period that included four albums, each Grammy nominated, globetrotting records that saw her collaborate with the world’s artists, from Europe to America to Africa and everywhere in between. This constant curiosity and staggering versatility was the product of years spent building the confidence to be artistically truthful and to speak to the audience from her heart.
More recently she has made a foray into film scoring, taking on perhaps her most challenging project to date by scoring the classic Indian silent film, Shiraz, for the British Film Institute. This is a thread she has continued by co-scoring Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy, a sonic portrait of post-partition India. Here, Shakar has proven herself an artist able to shift between mediums, timelines and styles with remarkable ease and flair.
Attention given to important histories is something that is reflected in her tireless activism. She has spoken bravely about her experiences as a woman and a survivor of child abuse, as well as campaigned for organisations such as the UNHCR and Help Refugees to raise funds and awareness for the refugee crisis. In 2020 she was announced as the inaugural President of the F-List: a UK database created to help bridge the gender-gap in music.
Anoushka Shankar’s Qwest TV selection reflects an artist who can balance many different ideas at once, one who is open to the world and connects with its diverse sounds. The great Ella Fitzgerald sits alongside Robert Glasper, Shabaka Hutchings, Paco de Lucia and African icons like Oumou Sangaré and Fatoumata Diawara. Three of her own films are also available as part of the list, one alongside her father, one documentary on raga and a collaboration with British electronic musician Gold Panda.
Rowan Standish Hayes
