Photo Credit: Henry Diltz
Wise Music Group announces a co-publishing agreement with The Ravi Shankar Estate, including a trove of unreleased recordings and unpublished compositions from the legendary Indian musician’s archives.
Wise Music Group, a leading international music publisher, has signed a co-publishing agreement with the estate of Indian sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. The deal includes Ravi Shankar’s archives containing a wealth of unpublished compositions, unreleased recordings, and the record label East Meets West Music.
Shankar was a prolific composer writing traditional ragas, chamber works, concertos, symphonic scores, and film soundtracks. The agreement includes 600 titles from Shankar’s Anourag Music Publishing, notably his scores for film director Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy and his landmark Grammy-winning 1967 collaboration with classical violist Yehudi Menuhin.
The archives contain representations of numerous artists, including Ravi’s daughters, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones, George Harrison, Herbie Hancock, Philip Glass, Zubin Mehta, Sting, Ray Charles, Phil Collins, and legendary Indian collaborators Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha.
The holdings include hand-engraved scores and handwritten compositions, more than 1,500 audio recordings, 2,100 video recordings, 600 films, over 5,000 photographs, 20 historically significant instruments custom-made for Shankar, stage wardrobes, correspondence, posters, clippings, and awards.
“We’ve been in the Wise family for a while, and we have decided to deepen and formalize that relationship and work directly with Wise as our publisher,” says Anoushka Shankar, who oversees her father’s musical holdings with her mother, Sukanya. “It’s a step into a more developed and direct relationship.”
Anoushka, a 9-time Grammy-nominated artist, composer, and sitar master in her own right, recently signed an exclusive publishing deal with Chester Music, part of the Wise Music Group. She notes that the latest agreement presents an exciting chance to develop an already-dazzling legacy further.
“The archives that we have are very extensive, so the amount of material that is unreleased is staggering. There’s a wealth of material to look at and develop in many ways,” Anoushka continues. “It was very important to have my father’s music in good hands with people with a vision and the ability to see that vision through, to keep his music alive and to keep sharing it. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to trust that Wise will do beautiful things with it.”
“I would like to thank Sukanya and Anoushka for entrusting us with Ravi Shankar’s unique musical legacy to ensure it will be protected and promoted worldwide in the future,” concludes Tomas Wise, CEO of Wise Music Group. “I am delighted that Wise Music Group, a family business, will now represent the music of two generations of the Shankar family.”