Shakti

Shakti is back! The revolutionary world music super group is ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a new record and extensive tour. The only opportunity to hear the band in Norway and Scandinavia is at this year’s Kongsberg Jazz Festival.

Following word of the Summer 2023 release of This Moment – their first new studio album in 46 years – revolutionary world music ensemble Shakti will continue to discover and explore the musical common ground bridging East and West. Born in the mid-1970s out of the deep artistic and spiritual connection bonding British guitarist John McLaughlin and Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, Shakti’s cross-cultural musical conversation dissolved boundaries with uncommon passion, grace, and dexterity – awakening subsequent generations of musicians to the possibilities of such hybrids in the process. Alongside McLaughlin and Hussain, today’s Shakti features vocalist Shankar Mahadevan, violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan, and percussionist Selvaganesh Vinayakram (son of original Shakti ghatam player T.H. “Vikku” Vinayakram).

In the late 1960s, John McLaughlin was featured on a couple of jazz’s most important records, the Miles Davis records In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. In all the years since, he has almost had star status. After the formidable success of The Mahavishnu Orchestra, he met tabla player Zakir Hussain and violinist L. Shankar, and eventually the group Shakti emerged. The meeting between an English guitarist with a background in jazz, rock and fusion and Indian musicians with deep roots in both classical and traditional Indian music should result in a completely unique and fascinating new kind of music that appealed to large audiences. This was innovative music; it was new and fresh with an immediate and positive effect on an appreciative audience.

50 years later, the band has announced its reunion, still with McLaughlin and Hussain from the original edition.

With the recording of their new studio album now complete, the members of Shakti now await the opportunity to continue their pan-global dialogue. “In our initial incarnation,” Zakir Hussain concludes, “we did not always have the time nor the means to explore.  Now, with the decades of individual musical experiences we all have poured into this, the result reveals an extraordinary depth and level of interaction within this band.”

For large parts of 2023, the band will be touring the world, with a single stop in Norway and Scandinavia: Kongsberg Jazz Festival.