Description
“It feels a bit strange to be releasing a compilation, as I still feel as if I’m at the beginning of a (hopefully) much longer journey ahead,” writes Anoushka Shankar on her latest album, Reflections. The album offers a compelling retrospective of her career so far, a carefully curated compilation of 15 tracks recorded in the last 20 years that mirrors her personal experiences and heartfelt connection to the lives of others.
With appearances by her late father Ravi and sister Norah Jones, this is an album made in response to the humanitarian refugee crisis, implicitly concerned with the crossing of cultures and borders. The theme plays out both in Ms. Shankar’s song titles (“Dissolving Boundaries,” “Boat to Nowhere”) and in her sensitive rapport with partners like Austrian Manu Delago, playing the Hang, a resonant metallic idiophone; Sanjeev Shankar, on the plaintive Indian reed instrument called a shehnai; and her husband, film director Joe Wright, who helped produce the album, giving it a sort of narrative pull.
The joy and fulfilment she feels when making music with others shines through the tracks on Reflections, which also features collaborations with, among the aforementioned, Spanish flamenco stars Pedro Ricardo Miño and Duquende, German-Turkish singer-songwriter Alev Lenz, American composer and producer DJ Karsh Kale, Israeli vocalist Noa Lembersky and American folk maestro Barry Phillips. Actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave reads Pavana Reddy’s poetry in “Remain the Sea”, a response to the European refugee crisis of 2015, while Norah Jones appears again in “Traces of You”, a haunting meditation on the way we carry with us the people we have lost and the places we have left behind. A stunning retrospective from a master musician.
