Father and Daughter Reunion

Recollections of when Ravi Shakar almost toured South Africa in 1972

About two decades ago, when I was a music writer for the Sunday Times Magazine in South Africa, I interviewed the American singer, songwriter, pianist and guitarist, Norah Jones. 

It was during the period after Jones had released Come Away With Me, her 2002 Blue Note Records debut that earned the-then 22-year-old a number one on the US Billboard 200 chart and sold more than 27 million copies. It was also a time when interviewing an international artist was done through a push-button telephone, and so you were unable to colour your piece with personal details that you can now see on Zoom - things like furniture, books, plants, pets and, for those contemporary online interviewers who really strike gold (and never fail to let us know it), a glimpse of a lover or children playing in the background. But, truthfully, there wouldn’t have been much to include because Jones was in a hotel room when we spoke and, let’s face it, how remarkable can any hotel room really be?

How did I know this? When setting up the interview, the record label representative had given me a hotel number to call, with strict instructions on who to ask to speak to - and it wasn’t Norah Jones but an altogether different name that ensured anonymity for the now globally famous artist and one that I was requested not to include in my writeup. I recall Jones being sheepish about this small subterfuge when we spoke, and even though I couldn’t see her face, and in spite of being fresh off becoming one of the handful of women artists to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, it was easy to pick up the down-to-earthness that other writers have used to describe Jones over her storied two decade music career.

What got me thinking about that interview was something much older - an article in a worn copy of Trend, the music magazine that my dad, Owen, started in the early 70s as a supplement to the Daily News where he worked as a journalist. With a purple Exclusive notice stamped boldly across the third column, and carrying the unambiguous headline Ravi Tour Off, the story gave notice that Ravi Shankar’s South African tour, scheduled from June 1 to June 21 in Durban and Johannesburg, had been cancelled by the Indian government. 

The issue is dated Tuesday April 18 1972 and the front page piece on the cancellation of the visit by the Indian sitarist and composer - who is also Norah Jones’ father - is fascinating from the distance of some 50 years.

For one, it reveals that the 16 December 1980 adoption by the UN of the resolution on the "Cultural, academic and other boycotts of South Africa" was preceded by concrete steps taken by individual governments, like India, to isolate the country. For another, the article offers a close-up look into the early work of Clive Calder, the South African (now billionaire) who, with Ralph Simon, co-founded Zomba a scant three years later. Based at first in London, the independent music company would go on to become an international heavy hitter through its record label, Jive Records, that counted DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, A Tribe Called Quest, Aaliyah, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC on its roster. My dad’s four-column exclusive also reveals the deeply segregated, highly regulated terrain that even an artist as internationally celebrated as Shankar faced when performing as an Indian, to whites and Indians, in early 1970s apartheid South Africa.

As my Dad reports, Shankar and his tabla player, Alla Rakha, had signed to Calder’s Johannesburg-based Sagittarius Management in December 1971 (here’s a video of the two of them, their seated positions reminding me of how much I have always loved the communing nature of Hindustani classical music). The planned South African tour would have seen them play 10 concerts, “four for Whites and six for Indians”. Because both concert venues were in spaces designated for whites only, the Apartheid government’s Department of Community Development (an entirely Orwellian,  disingenuous name because its task was to keep people separated, based on their race) had given permission for the performances in the Johannesburg City Hall while permission to use the Durban City Hall was pending. Even Shankar, a globally revered virtuoso whose work up that point included a 1970 commission by the London Symphony Orchestra to compose a concerto with sitar (Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra, performed with André Previn as conductor), required permission from apartheid bureaucrats to play his music in South Africa. Horrible to think about now but an instructive reminder of the extent that apartheid was designed to meddle in, manage and mediate all South African experience 

Owen wrote:

“A bitterly disappointed Clive Calder told me exclusively: I received a letter from Ravi’s American agents, American Program Bureau in San Francisco, via an agent of mine, Selwyn Miller. “In effect the letter said the Indian Government had refused to issue or approve a special visa for Ravi Shankar. This is ‘Because India and South Africa do not carry on diplomatic relations due to the apartheid policy of the South African government’. The letter also said ‘Under no circumstances other than familial death will the Government of India permit Shankar to travel to South Africa.”

Clive Calder said: “Ralph Simon, my associate, saw Ravi and his American lawyer Phil Chronis, in America when he was there a few weeks ago. Ravi said he was really very, very keen to visit South Africa, as he put it, ‘To see for himself.’

“As far as we are concerned, his contract has not been cancelled but merely postponed indefinitely. He says he is going to keep on trying, and is going to push through applications to visit South Africa as often as he can. Things may change in the future.

“We all thought that as India’s finest Ambassador, Ravi would have no trouble with the Indian officials. He is such a celebrity and has done much for India and its problems … like the recent Bangladesh concert which was his own idea. He lined up the best names in pop music - George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Klaus Voorman, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr - and made money for charity. We can only keep on trying,” he said.

The article ended with this dejected comment by Calder, 

“For once, the Department of Community Development was with us, and we had absolutely no problems there. This time it was the Government of India …” he said.

What my dad doesn’t write about in the article is what would have been his own crushing  disappointment at not seeing Shankar play live. Among my earliest memories from when we lived in our low-slung seventies style Umhlanga Rocks house until I was about 11 or 12 (when my parents separated) was my dad’s appreciation for Indian classical music. Actually it was more than an appreciation: Owen owned a sitar and was connected with Durban’s Indian cultural community - and if those things didn’t take him as far away from white suburbia in seventies South Africa as you can imagine, he also played the sitar, seated on our lounge floor, dressed in a short kurta shirt, filling our home with the instrument’s signature drone. “I remember Dad sitting cross-legged on the lounge floor, lost in the trance, like the sounds he was producing,” recalls my brother Mathew in a text when I ask my siblings for their memories of this time. There was no doubt in our minds that Owen loved Shankar and he played his records frequently, including his 1967 album Raga Khamaj/Raga Lalit which I remember being in our home not so much because of its specific music but because of the striking image of Shankar in full performance immersion on its cover. 

My dad Owen Coetzer

Readers, if you haven’t experienced Ravi Shankar’s music, watch this extraordinarily intimate 1970 performance of parts of Raga Khamaj. Or this wonderful interview with George Harrison and Shankar on the Dick Cavett Show where Harrison, speaking unhurriedly and with considered care, gently calls out Cavett for describing Indian music as “bizarre”. Filmed in November 1971, just months before Shankar was supposed to fly out to South Africa, Shankar plays during the show and then joins Cavett and Harrison for the rest of the interview and it is essential viewing for how he describes the demands of learning and playing Indian classical music. (It’s also worth watching to the end to see how Cavett presses Harrison on performing again by which of course he means as part of, or with, members of the recently broken up The Beatles. Harrison and Shankar’s understanding of what was being asked is visible as they try to turn the conversation back to Shankar’s Raga documentary film and music project, and their now seminal The Concert for Bangladesh which had taken place in Carnegie Hall a few months earlier and which was being made into a live album and film as part of Shankar’s fundraising effort that Calder also referred to in his interview with my dad.)

The video of “Raga Khamaj” also captures audio of Shankar speaking to the audience, with undisguised emotion, about his desire to be creative until the end of his life.

“It’s very difficult for a person, a person like myself, who is insatiable in demanding so much from life and at the same time wanting to give so much. I am so deeply grateful to all of you for being here and wishing me a long and healthy life. I ask something more from you. I will ask each of you to bless me so that at the end of my life, the last day of my life, I can be active and creative and try to achieve at least half of what I would like to make all of you really, really proud of me.”

Shankar died in December 2012, aged 92. His final concert was a month earlier, a performance with his daughter Anoushka, Norah Jones’ half-sister, a noted artist and sitar player herself. Owen died in 2003. He was just 65. He never did get to see Shankar play live.

I leave you with this dear reader,

It’s not the first time that I am noting this, but one of the small joys of returning to my own, or my dad’s, writing archive is noticing what surrounds the piece that I am writing about, especially the modest bits - news snippets, adverts, gig listings - that give glimpses into life at that particular moment in time. 

In this eight-page issue of Trend, I see that readers had the opportunity to come to the supplement’s office in the Daily News building in Durban’s Field Street, to pick an EMI-issued disc promoting Deep Purple’s latest album, Machine Head (that included what would become the English band’s biggest hit, Smoke On The Water). On a first-come, first served basis readers could “receive a copy of the disc which features an unspecified cut from the album and a commentary by John Berks” (who never struck me as a hard rock head in the decades after the 1970s when he morphed from being a radio DJ into a hugely successful talk show presenter).

There was also a Young Poets’ section, and a Surfing column by Garnet Currie who reported on the “long-awaited contest between Bay of Plenty and Addington”, two beaches that these days are a gentle stroll away from each other on Durban’s promenade but back in 1972 were defined by enmity. “Though let’s face it the animosity that has been sparking between the two surfing areas should never be, as it is not doing surfing any good,” wrote Currie, not hiding his disapproval of what he saw as petty divisions between the two surfing communities. “The Durban beachfront is in the same ocean and all surfers should be one” (it could probably go without noting but I will anyway because it is vital to never stop remembering: at that moment in South Africa’s history, all surfers meant all white surfers). Chartwise, Don McLean’s “American Pie" moved to the bottom of the Durban charts “for the first time” and Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion" was the number one song on both the Durban and the L.M. Radio charts. Simon’s popularity in the coastal city was some 15 years before the American artist broke the cultural boycott to record Graceland, which, I should note, won the Album of the Year Grammy Award 16 years before Norah Jones received it for an album that, at least to my ears, still stands up today. 

I should also leave you with this final note. Shankar’s musician daughters have released new music this year - Anoushka the ambient, transporting Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn and Jones the beautifully woven Visions. Both are worth your time.