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[On 16th-19th January, 2019, Homegrown is throwing a first-of-its-kind music festival in Mumbai designed to celebrate the city’s vast and diverse music culture. Dive deep into a wide variety of dynamic workshops, exhibitions, curated tours, panels, pop-ups, performances and parties that promise to be inclusive of all kinds of tastes and people.
There’s something for everyone, click here to find what’s perfect for you.]
When you get to soundtrack films commissioned by former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, you know Gingger Shankar isn’t one of those musicians who use their bloodline to get projects. The daughter of Viji Subramaniam and Dr L Subramaniam and a grand-niece to Pandit Ravi Shankar, Gingger has gone from scoring films that regularly premiere at Sundance Film Festival as well as being the go-to psychedelic violinist for The Smashing Pumpkins, The Flaming Lips and more.
Gingger plays the double violin, a ten-string hybrid that covers the spectrum of major stringed instruments like the cello, viola and violin. But the road to earning a name when it already carries with it a heritage has had its twists and turns for the Los Angeles-based Gingger.
She says, “I think the rebelling really came probably a year or two into classical concerts. I remember being in some hall somewhere and somebody was telling me about the kurta I needed to wear and how I needed to behave… It really bothered me. It just felt very constricting. So after that, I thought, ‘Screw this, I’m going to be a rock and roll person’. I’d grown up listening to Madonna and the Beatles, that’s what I wanted to do! There’s so much freedom in that. I loved it, but it was also a good balance of having both. I also became a film composer and worked on music for months and I go and do a bunch of shows.”
When her grandmother Lakshmi Shankar passed away in 2013, there was a realization that dawned on Gingger. “I did the rock thing, and the opera thing and only as an adult, I came back and went, ‘Wow, I respect so much of this’. It’s not quite my weight to carry, but at the same time, it’s something I want to pass forward to the next generations. You don’t also want this to go away, you know?”
Before her grandmother had passed, she passed on a scrapbook to Gingger, recounted many tales like the time they performed at the White House or meeting top musicians from across the world. “It kinda blew my mind, because I grew up with my grandmom and Mom and they were talked about this stuff. Never bragged, as women don’t, you know. That really opened up something for me that wanted to tell their stories,” she says.
The result was Nari, a multimedia performance piece that restored these memories of her mother and grandmother’s life and times through photos, visuals and contemporary music. Gingger worked with director Loren Schneider (from Fox Searchlight Pictures) and visual artist Shilo Shiv Suleman. Also on board was producer and collaborator Nicholas Bruckman, through a Sundance connection. She adds, “It was more about people I trusted because you’re giving my family photos, videos, the music – god knows what’s going to happen! It’s about people who really had the same wavelength and the ones I respected so much more.”
While Nari is slowly and steadily turning into a modern, multi-genre fusion album that will release sometime this year, Gingger has been composing for her full-length album Beautiful Imperfections as well. She said in an October 2016 interview, “Basically what we’re working on right now is the Nari project album and as soon as we finish that, at the end of the year, Beautiful Imperfections is going to come out next year. That’s sort of our running timeline. There’s this film, Nari, that’s finished and we have to get this album done because we have to be on the road with it next year too. So we’re bringing in a lot of guests and using my mother’s vocals and create a whole new album around it. I’m going to be in L.A. for the next two months and working on that.”
She spent important childhood years training in Chennai, so coming back and being a part of the Indian scene as an independent artist is something she’s working towards as well. “Just from hearing about the Weekender festival and stuff, I want to be there and know a lot more. A lot of my friends from the States know it and go there. The music scene is exploding there, isn’t it? I’d like it to be much more a part of me.”
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