What was it like going to India and working with Ravi Shankar and his daughter, Anoushka?
Ravi was so cool. He did this master class at his school there with some students from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, plus other performers like George Duke and Dee Dee Bridgewater and Chaka Khan. He came up and starting talking about different aspects of Indian classical music. They have this language that they use for expressing the sounds of the tabla [drum]: “Ta” is a certain sound; “geen” is another one. So he sings this rhythm with these sounds, and the tabla player played it. And then he sang a melody for the sitar player, and the sitar player played it-then Ravi sang another rhythm while the sitar player repeated the melody. It was really cool. When we recorded the song-the words were written by a German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke-I wanted it to be done in Hindi or another Indian language. The Indian singer we had, her name was Chitra and she’s from south India-she doesn’t speak Hindi, and she doesn’t read Urdu. So we had to-and this is really bizarre, but it’s so beautif
