Pandit Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar was born in Benares on 7 April 1920, the youngest of the sons of Shyam Shankar Chowdhury. As a boy he travelled with the dance company of his elder brother Uday Shankar, performing in Europe and the United States through the 1930s — an unusual apprenticeship that gave him the stage before it gave him a raga.

In 1938 he left the troupe to study sitar seriously under Ustad Allauddin Khan at Maihar, living in the traditional guru-shishya manner for several years. The training was severe and it remade him: he emerged in the 1940s as a soloist of unusual architectural clarity.

He worked as a composer and music director for All India Radio, founded its National Orchestra, and wrote the score for Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, beginning with Pather Panchali (1955).

From the mid-1950s he toured abroad steadily. His friendship with Yehudi Menuhin produced the West Meets East recordings; his teaching of George Harrison and his appearances at the Monterey Pop Festival (1967) and Woodstock (1969) placed the sitar in front of audiences who had never heard a raga. He was always careful to insist that curiosity should lead to the music itself, not to a fashion.

He continued to compose concertos, teach, and record into his nineties, and died in San Diego on 11 December 2012. His daughters Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones are both musicians.

Shankar's playing is remembered for its architecture: long, patient alap, the deliberate unfolding of a raga's character, and jhala passages of great rhythmic drive. He worked closely with Ustad Alla Rakha, and the two made the dialogue between sitar and tabla a form of its own on the concert stage.

As a composer he wrote for orchestra, ballet, and film, and he built structures — concertos, ensemble works — that let Indian melodic thinking sit beside Western forms without surrendering to them.