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 Smoke machine, strobe lights and ... sitar? That was the combination at the Highline Ballroom on Wednesday night. Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s daughter and musical disciple, and Karsh Kale, a tabla drummer who is also an electronica producer and programmer, have collaborated on an album, “Breathing Underwater” (Manhattan), and their band headlined a triple bill of world-music fusions to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Global Rhythm magazine. The transcontinental bill also included the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the Guadeloupean New York saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart.
“Breathing Underwater” is a generally somber album, weighed down by portentous ballads. The Shankar-Kale band got them out of the way during its set, with Monica Dogra taking over the vocals on “Easy,” a song that Ms. Shankar’s half-sister, Norah Jones, sings on the album.
The songs with words work like Bollywood tunes, with Ms. Shankar supplying clear-cut melodies and hooks on sitar. Vishal Vaid, singing in Hindi, took over for songs that moved the East-West balance closer to India, singing with the long, floating lines and curvy ornaments of Asian classical traditions.
But the set’s most memorable parts were instrumental, when hybrid rhythms — with Mr. Karsh’s tablas boosted by a funk rhythm section and electronic beats — set off improvisations and dizzyingly fast unison passages from Ms. Shankar on sitar and Ravichandra Kulur on wooden flute.
Ms. Shankar echoes both her father’s singing phrases and his aggressive, joyfully flamboyant attack, and Mr. Kulur played up the contrast with gliding, curling lines teasing against her staccato ones. It was dance club music with tradition at its fingertips. Read more at NYT
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