The most breathtaking Indian instrumental playing on recent CDs comes from the British guitarist John McLaughlin. Mahavishnu John, as McLaughlin was when he followed the guru Sri Chinmoy in the 1970s, builds climaxes and rushes up and down his frets with a frantic precision associated with the most experienced Indian players. Sceptics on the subject of Indo-jazz, as I was, really should listen.
This happens on a live double album called Remember Shakti on Verve. Shakti was McLaughlin's antidote to the jazz-rock of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s: influential and exciting but so whirling-dervish that after a couple of years the quartet burned itself out. In their 1990s reincarnation the tabla player, Zakir Hussain, and master of the clay pot, Vikku Vinayakram, are still thrashing away. On one track they bash out a duet for a good half an hour. The violinist of the original group, L Shankar, has been replaced by the great Indian flute player, Hariprasad Chaurasia.
Titles have slimmed down. "This is a piece," said McLaughlin on a 1975 album, "that is very simply called: 'What Need Have I for This - What Need Have I for That - I Am Dancing at the Feet of My Lord - All Is Bliss - All Is Bliss'," at which an audience could only explode with premature pleasure. Titles these days are simple - "Chandrakauns", the name of a raga, or "Mukti" (Liberation) - and applause comes where applause is due. The stylistic fusion of musical styles, by contrast, is more sophisticated. McLaughlin uses western harmony as another decorative device to spice up a loose raga. Chaurasia jazzes up his own tradition by emphasising notes that legitimately correspond to the blue ones of jazz. He plays the stiff bamboo flute with which the god Krishna coaxed cowherds to bed and produces sounds that are the most sinuous and beautiful you will hear.
Anoushka Shankar plays the sitar. Indeed, she plays "an old sitar which Ravi Shankar gave her as a gift a few years ago". Other things Ravi Shankar has given his daughter as gifts include the "specially and lovingly composed" pieces that Anoushka plays, correctly and rather stubbornly, on her debut CD, Anoushka, on Angel. Nobody owns up to giving her the anonymous poems printed in the CD booklet. The best is "First Love" : "I found you, or you found me, I can't recall,/but we found each other that day, somehow . . . "
Anoushka is indebted. Her father, she writes on the album's sleeve, is an incredible musician and teacher but also a wonderful dad and real human being, which makes him the most precious man she has ever known. She also needs to thank her producer and art director. They are "amazing guys". Her photographer is beautiful and wonderful. Her wardrobe assistant and hairdresser are great. And "lastly and importantly all the people who've been there for me throughout my life deserve thanks, too". One begins to feel excluded.
Anoushka's album strikes a big blow for gratitude and a smaller one for Indian women sitarists. This is not a joke. Ravi Shankar, in his late seventies, has lost his vigour; Anoushka has hers. At his increasingly irregular appearances she accompanies him, on the sitar. Her disc contains nothing ecstatically virtuosic or especially magical, but nothing positively unimpressive either.
Anoushka Shankar plays a serious instrument seriously and accepts succession from an illustrious guru and father. She sets an example. Indian women can play solo, too. Her short, nine-minute rendering of "Kirvan" has ticklish, precisely judged moments. But listen to an astonishingly compressed but wonderfully broad three-minute version of the same piece from Hariprasad Chaurasia and you know what you are missing. Chaurasia plays on The Raga Guide, a collaboration from Nimbus Records and the Rotterdam Conservatoire, which established itself, on its day of issue, as an essential new tool. Seventy-four Hindustani ragas are described and analysed. Special performances, by a variety of expert soloists, have been recorded on four CDs. And what does Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia have that Anoushka Shankar hasn't? Forty years' experience, to be charitable. Wit and style, to be frank.
