Interview: Anoushka Shankar - Anybody need a baby sitar?

ANOUSHKA SHANKAR is pleased that I’m interviewing her on the road, only a few hours before her next concert. “I feel most alive when I am on the road and playing to live audiences,” she tells me from a hotel in Basque country, northern Spain. “That’s when my music receives enormous impetus.” It’s been like that since, aged 13, she made her performing debut with her father Ravi Shankar, the master musician whose name is synonymous with both Indian music and the sitar.

Rather than live in her father’s shadow, as one of the few female international sitar performers, Shankar has carved out a distinguished solo career since recording her debut album, Anoushka, when she was just 17. Unsurprisingly, given Ravi Shankar’s cross-cultural career – which has seen him working with musicians from the Beatles to Philip Glass – she’s inherited his love of fusion projects.

While her first three recordings were classical, and she regularly performs classical Indian concerts, in parallel she’s trodden other musical pathways. In 2005 there was Rise, a mix of jazz, world music and other influences; then in 2007, with Karsh Kale, came Breathing Under Water, including contributions from her father and half-sister Norah Jones.

It’s her new work, Traveller, which makes it serendipitous to talk while she is touring. Its name, she tells me, captures key ingredients of her own life, as does its music, which brings together the Indian traditions she was brought up with, and Spanish flamenco.

Musically this is a natural liason, as these two independent traditions are linked historically by the Roma gypsies who originated in Northern India and were integral to the development of flamenco in Andalucia in southern Spain, where its heartbeat has long been nurtured by gypsy families.

“For centuries this music has travelled,” says Shankar. “Both owe huge debts to the creativity of gypsy and nomadic musicians, whom I feel hugely inspired by as I make my own musical journey. And on a personal level I know something of what it is to be a nomad, albeit a very privileged one, having lived on three continents and constantly been on the road.”

Shankar was born in London, where she lived until she was seven; she then lived for extended periods in California and New Delhi. Today she is back in London again, with her husband, the British film director Joe Wright (who made Pride and Prejudice and Atonement) and their baby son Zubin.

Zubin, eight months old, is sleeping beside her in the hotel bedroom when we talk; his arrival has shaped the whole Traveller project, she says, and she wanted to complete it before he was born. The album is her first since signing to the prestigious label Deutsche Grammophon and she’s enthusiastic about working on it with Javier Limón, Spain’s shrewdest and most talked-about producer. This has involved close collaboration and exchange in every aspect, from composition to arrangements to lyric writing and translating.

Limón, a Conservatoire-trained composer and instrumentalist, has a string of commercially successful, award-winning discs under his belt which testify to his instinctive knack for giving a contemporary twist to tradition. With a new post at Berklee College of Music, Boston, to set up a Mediterranean Music department, Limón is riding the crest of a wave. While awards have sealed his reputation, his gift is a cross-cultural vision for mixing tradition with the popular end of the cutting edge by bringing together musicians who work well together and seize the public and the media’s imagination.

Traveller does justice to both traditions while establishing vibrant connections. Shankar hopes it will reach both Indian and flamenco audiences and in the process introduce one to the other.

Beginning with the jaunty Inside Me, which celebrates her pregnancy, it progresses through deep Indian songs like Krishna, to Dancing in Madness, whose rhythms are danced out by the feet of Farruco and Mythilli Prakash. Contributing musicians include flautist Ajay Prasanna, singer Duquende, and veteran guitarist Pepe Habichuela.

“You can spend ages recording but working against such an important clock made us focused, working in Madrid and London and then finally mixing in California, where I had the baby.” says Shankar of recording during her pregnancy. “That inability to dither means it kept its freshness and spontaneity.”

While the touring group can include only a few musicians involved in the recording, Shankar is delighted with the chemistry they create in concert. The group includes up-and-coming singer Sandra Carrasco – who turned to flamenco as an adult and emulates the delicate yet nuanced female voice favoured today – and her guitarist husband, 24-year-old Melon Jiménez, born in Spain though half-German.

With two core percussionists on board – India’s Pirashanna Thevarajah and Spain’s Israel “El Piraña” Suarez, as well as shehnai oboist Sanjeev Shankar, Shankar is enjoying being on the road with the next generation Shankar in tow.

• Anoushka Shankar and group play the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, tonight. www.anoushkashankar.com