In This Article
Origins: A Guitarist's Pilgrimage East
By the early 1970s, John McLaughlin had already upended the jazz world. His incendiary playing on Miles Davis's Bitches Brew (1970) and his own Mahavishnu Orchestra records had established him as the most technically audacious guitarist of his generation. Yet McLaughlin felt he had reached an impasse with electric fusion. His deepening engagement with Indian spirituality — he was a devoted student of Sri Chinmoy and, later, of broader Vedantic philosophy — pointed him toward a radically different musical path.
The catalyst was L. Shankar (Lakshminarayana Shankar), a prodigiously gifted Carnatic violinist who had trained under his father, V. Lakshminarayana Iyer, and had already performed at the Music Academy, Madras. McLaughlin and Shankar met in New York in 1973, and their private sessions — trading phrases, testing the limits of each other's modal vocabularies — convinced both that a full ensemble was possible. They recruited Zakir Hussain, the young tabla virtuoso and son of the legendary Ustad Alla Rakha, and T. H. "Vikku" Vinayakram, the ghatam maestro from a distinguished Carnatic percussion lineage. The South Indian mridangam player Ramnad Raghavan (R. Raghavan) was part of the earliest configurations, though Vinayakram became the enduring percussive anchor. The band was christened Shakti — the Sanskrit term for creative cosmic energy — and with that name came a statement of intent: this would not be ornamental "East meets West" exotica, but a genuine fusion of structural principles.
Breaking Ground: The Musical Innovations
What set Shakti apart from contemporaneous fusion experiments — Ravi Shankar's collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin, or the Beatles' surface-level appropriation of sitar timbres — was its insistence on structural depth. The musicians did not merely borrow flavours; they wove together two sophisticated improvisatory traditions at the level of grammar.
- Raga and modal jazz: McLaughlin adapted his acoustic guitar technique to articulate gamakas (ornamental oscillations) and phrases rooted in ragas such as Kirvani, Charukesi, and Hamsadhwani, while Shankar responded with jazz-inflected phrasing — bends and double-stops foreign to orthodox Carnatic violin.
- Tala as architecture: Compositions such as Joy, India, and Lotus Feet employed complex Carnatic talas — Misra Chapu (7 beats), Khanda Chapu (5 beats), and intricate korvais (rhythmic cadential patterns) — rather than the 4/4 and 6/8 grooves of jazz-rock fusion.
- Conversational improvisation: The ensemble developed a practice akin to Carnatic kalpana swaram exchanges but informed by the call-and-response ethos of jazz. McLaughlin and Shankar would trade increasingly virtuosic salvos, while Hussain and Vinayakram maintained an interlocking rhythmic dialogue between the North Indian thekedaar tradition and the South Indian solkattu vocabulary.
- Acoustic purity: In an era dominated by electric excess, Shakti performed entirely acoustically. McLaughlin designed a custom steel-string acoustic guitar with scalloped frets — allowing him to execute the deep bends essential to raga phrasing — and added sympathetic drone strings reminiscent of the vīṇā.
Their self-titled debut, Shakti with John McLaughlin (1976, Columbia Records), was recorded live at Southampton College, New York. The follow-ups — A Handful of Beauty (1977) and Natural Elements (1977) — deepened the synthesis. Critics were astonished; the American jazz press struggled to categorise music that demanded fluency in both Coltrane and Tyagaraja to fully appreciate.
"We were not trying to mix oil and water. We found that the water was the same — only the vessels were different."
— John McLaughlin, interview with Guitar Player, 1977
Remember Shakti and the 21st-Century Reunion
After disbanding in 1978, the project lay dormant for nearly two decades. In 1997, McLaughlin reconvened the group as Remember Shakti, retaining Zakir Hussain and adding new members: the mandolin prodigy U. Srinivas, Carnatic vocalist and veena player Shankar Mahadevan (later of Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy), and percussionist V. Selvaganesh (Vinayakram's son, on kanjira and tabla). The albums Remember Shakti (1999) and Saturday Night in Bombay (2001, recorded live at the NCPA, Mumbai) demonstrated that the concept had only matured: compositions like Finding the Way and Ma No Pa incorporated Hindustani and Carnatic elements with even greater fluidity.
The tragic passing of U. Srinivas in 2014 cast a long shadow over any future reunion. Yet in 2023, McLaughlin — then eighty years old and reportedly considering retirement from touring — announced a final world tour under the original Shakti banner. The line-up featured Hussain, Shankar Mahadevan, Selvaganesh, and Ganesh Rajagopalan on violin. The tour encompassed dates across Europe (including a rapturously received concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July 2023), North America, and India, where performances at Bengaluru's Palace Grounds and Shanmukhananda Hall in Mumbai drew audiences spanning three generations of rasikas.
McLaughlin described the tour as a "completion of a circle", and indeed the concerts had the quality of a summation: extended improvisations in ragas such as Kalyani and Abhogi, breathtaking tani avartanam-style percussion duels between Hussain and Selvaganesh, and moments of meditative stillness that recalled the original trio recordings. The devastating loss of Zakir Hussain in December 2024 has since rendered these performances all the more precious — a final document of one of the greatest rhythmic minds in the history of music.
Lasting Impact on World Music and Beyond
Shakti's influence radiates in multiple directions. Most immediately, the ensemble legitimised Indian classical music as an equal partner in cross-cultural dialogue, rather than a subordinate source of exotic colour. This paved the way for artists such as:
- Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer, who integrated Carnatic and Hindustani concepts into post-bop jazz.
- Anoushka Shankar, whose collaborations range from flamenco to electronica but always centre the structural integrity of raga.
- Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain's explorations of banjo-tabla dialogue, an unlikely pairing that Shakti's precedent rendered conceivable.
- The broader "world music" genre itself — a category that, for all its commercial limitations, owes its intellectual credibility in part to the standard Shakti set.
Within the Indian classical ecosystem, Shakti demonstrated that engagement with Western forms need not entail dilution. L. Shankar's post-Shakti career, U. Srinivas's dazzling mandolin innovations, and Selvaganesh's rhythmic explorations all bore the imprint of an ensemble that demanded the highest levels of traditional mastery before any fusion was attempted.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Shakti is one of musical ethics. In an age where "fusion" often means superficial juxtaposition — a tabla loop under a pop melody, a sitar sample in an electronic track — Shakti's members insisted on decades of disciplined training, deep mutual listening, and genuine compositional integration. The result was not a hybrid but a third tradition: music that belongs fully to neither jazz nor Carnatic convention, yet honours both with absolute rigour.
For the serious rasika, revisiting Shakti's recordings today is not merely a nostalgic exercise. It is a reminder that the most radical musical innovation often emerges not from technology or trend, but from the courageous meeting of two ancient traditions willing to transform — and be transformed by — each other.