Live at Carnegie Hall

All the comments I read in some way make some sense: It is true that Anoushka's music has a more lightness to it and it has not the depth of Ali Akbar Khan or Nickel Banerjee and it is true that she sounds refreshing and lively. To me it more has the depth of the Klavichord music by Louis Couperin wich trough it's lightness and elegance suggest an enormous depth. A same depth that is sometimes achieved even by very commercial R&B music with it's big range of effects.
Anoushka is not that indian sitar player that has never perfomed and plays more like say Shahid Parvez and that why she does not sound like that.She is another person with a very well known dad wich results in (apart from the inherited tradition) other music.
She also plays piano. Can you master two instruments? A purist would say but what is pure? Remember the greatest african art was not made as art but as tools, tools to deal with the direct phenomenology of the world from doing the dishes to communicating about the unknown. There was no cultivations of separate doctrines with their predefined aims and recipes here.
This purity concept is a western shortcoming which we might have enhireted from the Plato-Kant tradition of evolving to a to be known true that doesn't exist. I would love to hear a duet with piano and sitar (But the piano is tempered in tuning and the sitar is naturally tuned! So what isn't that a great challenge)
I am not saying that other instruments have to be used and old traditions have to be renewed (there are most terrible productions on the market of cross over projects terrible because they where intended to be multicultural and cross over)but please don't block ones development.
If one can not draw that what he wants perhaps fotography or painting might work, or both.
That also is like that with sound. If you feel you need two tablas use them both. The tablas indeed get a little confused with eachother and with the sitar but that what I like about it, why use two tablas if they do not do something together with the sitar. What they do might be unconventional but what Balarama Pathak was doing was also unconventional (using chords in sitar playing). I am not saying that Anouskhas music is flawless but it is fresh and that is exactly what is needed to keep a tradition alive. Listen to the best songs of John Lee hooker, he has created within the "not following the musical rules" an enormous space that has enriched musical rules enormously. Or look at the french composer Pierre Boulez in classical music. He is enormously conscious of the western classical music tradition and trough a whole new appraoch of the twelf tone system he is keeping the tradions alive, and what a monumentuos music. So anouska be glad you have the oppertunities you have, be glad you have a famous father. Be open minded and creative!
And do not try to focus to much on trying to fully controll every note, your not alone there is the sitar too. This wil further develop the great open character of your music.
It must be this openness which your father admires when he says you inspire him, it creates a future. Remember Pierre Boulez had many diffuculties with developing a new vocabular in a conservative classical doctrine, now he is one of the greatest composers of the 20th and 21th century.

Bela Teeken