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Gingger Shankar grew up among Indian musical royalty, but never realized the groundbreaking power of the voices of her mother and grandmother, Viji, and Lakshmi Shankar.
"I knew my grandmother sang a little bit, but not much more than that," says Shankar of the women she thought of as nurturers and homemakers, rather than performers.
The men in her family were some of India's most iconic musicians, and she grew up immersed in that legacy.
What she wasn't as aware of was that her mother was also an Indian singer, while her grandmother, the sister-in-law of sitar player Ravi Shankar, was also a conductor and a singer. Both of her maternal ancestors were part of the famous generation of Indian musicians who became known to the world in the 1970s through their connections with George Harrison and the Beatles.
It wasn't until her grandmother lent her some scrapbooks that she began to realize the fame of the women in her family. "These two women were in the front, always the voices you heard, and my grandmother is conducting the orchestra, but nobody knows their story," she says. "It blows my mind that they were such an amazing part of history, but the women didn't quite get their dues."
In 2013, Shankar began working with collaborators on "Nari," a multimedia performance piece named with a Sanskrit word that means both "women" and "sacrifice." "The fact that's a word that tells you both of those is things is really interesting," she says.
"Nari" combines video and live performances of vocals and Indian percussion, with Shankar playing her unique double violin. Beyond its Indian folk music style, the work is spiked with the flair of more contemporary animation and hip-hop and electronica sounds, as well as remixes of her mother and grandmother's songs, all synchronized to archival videos and photographs. After performing the work at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Shankar will return to Utah on Saturday leading a three-piece band that will perform at Salt Lake City's Living Traditions festival.
The free annual festival in downtown's Washington Park kicks off Utah's summer concert season, with a lineup that features international headliners as well as local musicians and dancers and a wide variety of ethnic food booths.
Shankar's personal, yet universal project, celebrating women's voices and restoring them to a musical story, seems a noteworthy headliner for a festival that works to keep alive the musical traditions of the West's immigrant communities.
Shankar is a performer whose brand of musical diversity is as interesting as her family's story.
As a musician, she's worked alongside artists including Katy Perry and the Smashing Pumpkins, as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "People always say, 'When did you become a musician?' and I say, 'I don't know.' People were always rehearsing and people were always performing in our house," says the film composer and violinist, who studied music and dance in her native Los Angeles as well as at an Indian boarding school.
She used to perform violin, viola and other instruments in the same set, but found it difficult to mic all her string instruments. Carrying them around while touring also was difficult. She commissioned a luthier in Boston to craft a double violin, an instrument that produces the sounds of the entire string range, from violin and viola to bass and cello. She loves the range of notes it provides, as well as its sound.
Her great-uncle, Ravi Shankar, and her grandmother composed music for films (such as "Gandhi"), while her father worked on "Salaam Bombay," and she remembers running around film studios while they worked.
But she says she fell into film composing by accident when a music supervisor selected a song with her voice and double violin for the soundtrack of "The Passion of the Christ" and invited her to the studio to work on sound cues. Later, she was invited to attend the Sundance Institute's Composers Lab, where she found mentors who helped launch her work as a film composer for a wide range of movies, and multiple return visits to the annual Park City film festival.
Since "Nari" was performed at the New Frontier exhibit at Sundance last winter, the work has continued to evolve. Shankar calls it a "living, breathing project," while one of her collaborators, Dave Liang, refers to it "a modern electronic opera."
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Musical remixes and mashups
Gingger Shankar will present "Nari," a tribute and remix celebrating the female voices in her iconic musical family, at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, as part of The Living Traditions Festival.
What • Living Traditions Festival, Friday-Sunday, May 20-22; 5-10 p.m. Friday; noon-10 p.m. Saturday; noon-7 p.m. Sunday
Where • Washington Square, 450 S. 200 East, Salt Lake City
Tickets • Admission is free; food and beer and wine available for purchase.
Schedule • See the full slate of performers and events at livingtraditionsfestival.com