How long can Shankar Mahadevan sustain a single note? With this question News18 anchor Anand Narasimhan set the stage rolling for a fun banter between the Grammy Awardees at the at the final session on Day 1 at Rising Bharat Summit 2024, the fourth edition of the CNN-News18 marquee leadership conclave held over two days at Taj Palace in New Delhi on March 19-20.
Grammy 2024 winners singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan, percussionist V Selvaganesh and violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan and flautist Rakesh Chaurasia attended the event. Chaurasia on the flute and the Breathless singer jammed together briefly to hold that note on stage.
It was evident that all the Grammy winners riffed off each other, musically and in stories.
When asked what Bharat meant to them, Ganesh Rajagopalan said, "Bharat is Shakti," further adding, "We are rising in all spheres. We see that Bharat is the next hope for humanity. Bharat is the Shakti of the world." While Rakesh Chaurasia said, "Bharat for me is breath, what I blow into my flute."
Selvaganesh added, "There are five Grammys from India [this year], two other Indians were also nominated as was our PM was also nominated...so Bharat is definitely being noticed."
Mahadevan, Selvaganesh and Rajagopalan represented the John McLaughlin and Ustad Zakir Hussain’s Indo Jazz band Shakti, that won Best Global Music Album for 'This Moment', while flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia’s nephew Rakesh Chaurasia won his first ever Grammy Best Global Music Performance award on February 5, 2024, for ‘Pashto’, along with Zakir Hussain, Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer.
When Rakesh Chaurasia was asked about his uncle Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia's reaction to the news of the Grammy Award, the former said that the senior artiste only said “It's okay”, that's the sign of a great guru (mentor), said Rakesh Chaurasia, adding that when he told he's won two Grammy awards, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia exclaimed "Arre Waah" but was quick to ask, "why two for the same album?" 'Pashto' won in two categories: album and song, while it was nominated for three categories, including for composition.
'This Moment', which features eight songs, is Shakti's first new album after 46 years. The album, which represents 50 years of the band's evolution since its beginning in 1973, released on June 30, 2023.
Talking how the album came into being during the peak of COVID 19 pandemic, Shankar Mahadevan said, "we were getting withdrawal symptoms because we couldn't travel [for concerts], so we had to do an album, but nobody could move out of the house because of COVID, so the way this album happened was completely remote-controlled. Zakir bhai from San Francisco, Selva ji and Ganesh ji from Chennai and Seattle, I from Mumbai and John ji from Monaco, all of us recording, files going up and down on a server, bars being exchanged. When the mix was finally over we knew we had cracked something which was almost next to impossible."
The session anchor asked each artiste to say a word about another among them. Each relayed stories and anecdotes. Talking about Selvaganesh, Ganesh Rajagopalan said the two have been "childhood friends". Ustad Zakir Hussain, who won three Grammy Awards this year, wasn't present but he was remembered by all the artistes as a "brother, mentor, friend, guide". Mahadevan added, "all of us are here because of that one man called Ustad Zakir Hussain." About Shankar Mahadevan, Rakesh Chaurasia shared how he googles about the cuisine of every place he travels to and takes others to sample the local food.
Even before they came on stage, the Grammy-winning Shakti band members and Rakesh Chaurasia were seen jamming on a table with other musicians, such as composer and record producer Louis Banks and tabla player Ojas Adhya. While interacting with the media on the red carpet, when asked about the one song he’d like to dedicate to the occasion and the event, Shankar Mahadevan said it would be the title song of Shah Rukh Khan’s Kal Ho Naa Ho.
Shakti introduced the fusion genre to the world in the 1970s and Mahadevan has said in many interviews earlier that it was “was a band which was a part of [his] music learning process”, just by listening to their cassettes when he was in school and college. Years later, he would join the band.
In 1997, when McLaughlin wanted to re-group Shakti, which had disbanded at one point, Selvaganesh's father and former Shakti member the Grammy-winning percussionist Vikku Vinayakram was busy, and so Selvaganesh and U Srinivas joined the band, and later, Mahadevan came on board and has been its part for 24 years.
The band was originally formed in 1973 by English guitarist John McLaughlin, Indian violin player L Shankar, and Grammy-winning percussionists Zakir Hussain and Vikku Vinayakram. The band’s sound is a mix of acoustic fusion, Indian classical and elements of jazz.
In 2023, Shakti hosted a 50th Anniversary Tour globally, across 27 cities, which also featured 17 US performances with solo opening slots by Bill Frisell, Béla Fleck, John Scofield and Jerry Douglas. At the same time, at the 65th Grammy Awards last year, Shankar Mahadevan featured in the jugalbandi piece 5 Peace Band on the Berklee Indian Ensemble’s album Shuruaat, which was nominated for the Best Global Music Album.
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