Anoushka Shankar Finds Her 'I' in 'Team' With Karsh Kale

If Anoushka Shankar is trying to establish her own musical identity with her new album, 'Breathing Under Water,' she has a funny way of going about it. After years of being known first as Ravi Shankar's daughter and more recently as Norah Jones' half-sister, she gives both of them prominent roles on the record -- Dad's sitar (not hers) being the featured instrument on arguably the album's two-part thematic centerpiece, 'Oceanic' (alone on part one, in a father-daughter duet in part two), and Sis' oh-so-familiar voice leading the song 'Easy,' the siblings' first released pairing. Oh, and there's another song, "Sea Dreamer," which features a guy named Sting, who has a habit of drawing the spotlight to himself wherever he goes.

If that's not enough, 'Breathing Under Water' technically isn't even an Anoushka Shankar album - it's a dual project, where she is co-billed with producer-musicians Karsh Kale.

And yet Shankar says she's never felt so free to be herself.

"For me it was about developing as a composer and producer and musician, stretching with Karsh to places I'd never been to as a musician," says Shankar, 25. "On this record, there was an element of caring a little less of what people were going to say, which allowed me to reach out to the high-profile guests without it being taken out of context. I deal with the 'daughter/sister' tag all the time. But why be afraid of that and deny myself the chance to make great music with great people."

Rather than being stuck in those relatives' and associates' shadows, she prefers to think of it as basking in their glow. Her collaborator (whose name is pronounced "Kursh Kah-lay") concurs: "If we had started pulling in random people for this, we would have not gotten the same results," he says. "First and foremost, the artists on this album are inspirational to us. Sting is someone I grew up studying his music. To work with him and write a song for him were the biggest challenges I've had as a musician. With Ravi, for Anoushka it's always an honor and he's her inspiration. And Norah, I've been a fan from the beginning. When that possibility came about, it was secondary what it would mean other than for the music."

And those are only the best-known guests. Gaurav Raina, of electro-Indian innovators Midival Punditz, served as co-producer on a few tracks, Bollywood mainstay composer Salim Merchant helped shape several pieces, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (a former top student of Ravi Shankar) lends his dazzling playing on his slide guitar-like instrument the mohan veena to the tracks 'Slither' and 'PD 7,' and noted Bollywood composer-singer Shankar Mahadevan and singer Sunidhi Chauhan are among others contributing, with sessions having taken place in Hollywood, New York, Bombay and Delhi.

The process was something both Shankar and Kale liken to cinema rather than music. "I kind of looked at it as a film, casting characters," Kale says.

And the star of this film? "When we got together, we spoke abut the role of the sitar in the past, how it kind of lost its way in Western fusion and pop," he says. "So the sitar is the main voice."

As for the whole tale, Kale refers to the common ground of his and Shankar's backgrounds, as both were largely raised in the United States by Indian-born parents. Musically, though, they have each come from different places -- her firmly ground in Indian classical music, him a star in the electronica and DJ culture. But he's long been drawing on his heritage in that context, both with the cross-cultural group Tabla Beat Science and his own albums on the Six Degrees label. And she took her first formal steps toward a global approach with her fourth album, 2005's 'Rise,' crafting a variety of genre-blending settings for her sitar skills. 'Breathing Under Water' is something of a chronicle of their respective journeys.

"The album's supposed to create the idea that we're all traveling through so many worlds, but we stay the same person," he says.

In that light, 'Breathing Under Water' is the true representation of their identities -- and the guests, even the highest-profile ones, are essential to that. Still, it's a tricky business to put all those people and styles together in a way that communicates. Often trying to do everything winds up with something that's nothing. Paris-based Spaniard Manu Chao's solo career is testimony to that. It took him nearly a decade and four albums before really hitting on a mix that's more than a sum of its parts, in which the varying styles don't cancel one another out, with his remarkable new 'La Radiolina.'

"We're speaking a lot of languages on this, but all things we're familiar with," Shankar says. "We made this on a very intrinsic and genuine level, rather than approaching it scientifically or trying to make a point, which is something I've always tried to avoid. It is a challenging record, but we were adamant we didn't want to hold back. And because it's a collaboration, we were able to say more than we each could individually -- just honest expression."