Anoushka Shankar offered a night of epiphanies in the Neza room

The sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar offered a concert full of beauty on Wednesday night at the Nezahualcóyotl hall. In an unusual chamber quartet format, he lindó ragas, inventions, melopeas. It consolidated its transition from Indian classical music to the most interesting avant-garde known. It is, along with Pat Metheny’s concert in the same hall in September, the best thing that has happened in music in many years. And boy, we enjoy a very intense, varied and privileged musical life.

It was the first time that Anoushka Shankar performed in Mexico. Thus also began his Latin American tour, titled Chapters Tour, with the live presentation of his recent trilogy.

Many amazing things happened, among them, one is the Anoushka Shankar of the albums she has recorded and another is the composer on the scene who has already revolutionized the world of music.

The most amazing thing, never seen or heard: none of the instruments sounded like what they are; That is to say: the clarinet sounded like anything but a clarinet, instead it sounded like a symphony orchestra oboe and a Tibetan oboe, an English horn and, well, at times a clarinet.

The drums did not sound like that, but rather a magical artifact that sounded like bells (tintinabuli), birds chirping, silent roar, thunder and lightning. A whole paradigm.

The use of the central drums and cymbals, activated with smooth mallets that are customary in other types of percussion instruments, gave the music a bristly and warm spine at the same time.

The acoustic bass sounded like the song of sirens in front of Ulysses’ boat, and also the wailing of the other sirens, those of the ships, known as “fog horns,” and the trembling of the fog at dusk in Xalapa, and everything that happens in the forests as dawn breaks.

Anoushka herself, a simple and very happy girl, presented what she called “my amazing band” on two occasions: Sarathy Korwar on drums and percussion, Thomas Farmer on double bass and Arun Ghosh on clarinet. Pirashanna Thevarajah, activator of Indian percussion: mridangam and ghatam, did not travel.

The evening began with Anoushka alone and her sitar: forays into the strung neck and into the end close to the matrix of the instrument, practically synthesizer sounds, although it was always sitar, in burning intensities until reaching that spiritual practice of the music of India and in Mongolian regions of the creation of parasitic sounds, like orchids, which are actually parasites despite the bad reputation of the word: they are precious gems and those sounds are born from the conjunction of sonars that, when they stop being parallel and come together, emit new, ululating sounds. Longing.

There were prolonged moments of climax. High speeds, burning temperatures. A magic that made the fast pass like a fish in slow motion, a crane crossing the horizon, a golden sunset.

Wonders and surprises

Anoushka in front of the charioteer: at times she seemed to activate, with everything and position of her body, a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar as if she were Eric Clapton, but in reality it was Anoushka playing her sitar, while the double bassist executed dance movements by producing hallucinogenic sounds from the neck of his double bass, the drummer made a choir of woodpeckers sound in the forest and the clarinet in turn stopped sounding like a clarinet to produce hymns, songs, proverbs, incandescence setting the sky on fire.

For moments we were in front of a punk music concert, and then we moved on to situations of Elizabethan music and then hard rock and then unusual situations, like when Arun Ghosh took off his Tibetan oboe embouchure to activate an electric keyboard that actually sounded like celesta, that percussion instrument with a keyboard that is heard, indeed, with the aroma of the celestial.

For two hours, these musicians of stratospheric quality performed different pieces spread across the trilogy Chapters (I, II y III), as well as chapters from other Anoushka Shankar albums, such as Traces of You, that album he recorded with his sister, Norah Jones, and also performed a raga composed by his father, Ravi Shankar.

It was a night of wonders. One surprise after another. What is valued as avant-garde, that is, what is new, what has never been heard before, what is extracted from the bottom of the sea, from caves, springs, cornucopias.

The night of Wednesday, March 18, leaves a mark on the history of music: a quartet of musicians turning into sounds what mystics treasure in their minds and hearts and that the world cannot name and we can only get closer to the mystery, the magic, the ungraspable but within the reach of all of us under the mantle of a plural and intimate word: we lived in that concert in the Nezahualcóyotl hall, a glorious night of epiphanies.