Sharan Rani / Chatur Lal - Music of India / Drums of India

Sharan Rani was the first woman instrumentalist and the only female sarod player of India, a musician so synonymous with her instrument her appreciative public called her "Sarod Rani" Her teachers were the revered Allauddin Khan, guru to Ravi Shankar, who taught most of the best known instrumentalists in Northern India, and his son, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the great master sarodist who founded schools in America and who, with his brother-in-law Shankar did so much to bring world renown to the mysteries of Indian classical music. With more formal education than most Indian performers (she held an M.A from Delhi University), Sharan Rani combined intellectual understanding of her art with a very special gift for emotional communication. Her touch was light but very sure and her improvisations sprung from the from the heart with a remarkably direct tenderness and sensuality that could be overwhelming. These recordings was made in San Francisco in November 1961, during the course of a world tour that took in Australia, the Fiji Islands, France, England, Switzerland and West Germany. El.