SAN DIEGO — In the 30 years that have passed since she made her high-profile concert debut at the age of 13, Anoushka Shankar has released 10 solo albums, earned 11 Grammy Award nominations and performed multiple times at New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Royal Albert Hall and other landmark concert venues.

Along the way, she’s collaborated with her legendary father, the late Indian music icon Ravi Shankar, and with everyone from Herbie Hancock, Jacob Collier and Patti Smith to the London Philharmonic, Norah Jones (who is Shankar’s half-sister) and former Beatle George Harrison, one of the closest friends and champions of Anoushka’s dad.

But even now, this 1999 San Dieguito Academy honors graduate and homecoming queen vividly recalls her first concert with a combination of awe, fright and delight. “It was terrifying, just terrifying!” said Shankar. “But, afterwards,” she added with a laugh, “it was bizarrely wonderful!”

Her trepidation and subsequent delight were perfectly understandable for Anouska, whose new album, “Chapter III: We Return to Light,” is being released March 14.

Her 1995 stage debut took place in Siri Fort, the most prestigious performance venue in India’s capital city of New Delhi. The setting was her famed father’s all-star 75th birthday concert. Ravi Shankar had long been hailed as India’s greatest and most internationally celebrated composer, band leader and cultural champion.

To make matters more intimidating, she was featured as a soloist on the sitar, a deviously difficult instrument that has 19 strings and whose undisputed master was her famous dad. Anoushka’s accompanist that night was Zakir Hussain, one of the world’s foremost tabla drum players. And because of her father’s fame and the significance of his 75th birthday, there was intense media coverage. (A longtime Encinitas resident, Ravi Shankar died here in 2012, just five weeks after he and Anoushka performed together in Long Beach at the final concert of his career.)

‘My heart started beating’

“I ended up doing a series of shows (in 1995) with my father in a few cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, but New Delhi was the first,” recalled Anoushka, who was her dad’s first female sitar student.

“I remember my parents having a conversation about his students who were flying in from around the world for the concert … until they both turned to look at me, realizing I wasn’t playing in the show. So, it wasn’t intended as a (career) launch (for me). It was more like: ‘Oh, does she want to take part?’

“My heart started beating out of my chest as the concert progressed, because I knew we were coming closer and closer to my solo in the middle of the show … The next day after the concert, every major publication in India had a picture of me and my father, and there were some proper reviews of my debut. So, it had that weight and pressure to it, which was hard to ignore.”

Anoushka’s self-titled debut album was released in 1998, one year before her high school graduation. It was produced by her father and exclusively featured music he composed. Her current North American tour is in support of her 14th album, “Chapter III: We Return to Light.” It completes a trilogy that also includes “Chapter 1: Forever, For Now” and “Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn.”

All three were recorded at separate locations over the past two years. While Anoushka’s work is still rooted in the age-old classical traditions of India, her trilogy deftly incorporates elements of trance, ambient and other more contemporary Western electronic music styles to create an often-melancholic old world/new world synthesis.

In doing so, Anoushka seeks to present the sitar in new settings to attract new listeners, without intimidating them in the way they might be by the complexities the classical music of south and north India — Carnatic and Hindustani — respectively.

“It was conceived as a trilogy, only in that I wanted to make three releases that were going to end up connected,” she explained. “But at that initial time, I didn’t have a clear map for what that was going to mean; that came more through the organic process of actually making the music.

“All I knew was I wanted to make three separate albums that tied up together, that I would have a different producer and different collaborators for each one, that I would record them each in different locations, so that that would also seep into the music. I just really wanted to open myself up to a creative process as much as possible, so that I could go with as much of a blank slate as possible into each new space.

“Having said that, of course “Chapter One” set a template and began a story that I then followed through “Chapter Two” and “Chapter Three.” And what’s been really fascinating for me is it was only in January, two years ago, where I set myself this task.”

She chuckled.

“Now, here we are two years later, with three albums in two years. And I’ve done somewhere around 70 concerts in that time, (so) it’s been this great process of allowing the music to evolve and grow through a tour and recording process … That’s been influencing the music that comes out into (each) chapter. It’s all been happening kind of live and in real time …

“It wasn’t just one chapter of recorded music that was influencing the next chapter. It was also the experience of it being played live. So, the live music was also influencing how the story evolved into the next chapter, if that makes sense.”

Anoushka spoke recently to the San Diego Union-Tribune from her home in London. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Having seen you and your father perform together, especially near the end of his life, it really felt to me like a musical baton was being handed to you by the world’s greatest and most famous Indian classical music artist. That is an awesome responsibility, but also a unique opportunity to extend the way the sitar is heard and perceived by audiences, to take it to the next step.

A: One of the great excitements I’ve had in this last decade or so has been very much thinking consciously about how the sitar is perceived and how it can be, well, “used” sounds a bit casual, but what kind of lives can it live? What sound worlds can it exist in? And that’s been something that’s opened up my musical experience hugely. So, yeah, I think thinking in terms of the evolution of the instrument, which has been something that’s really helped me find direction in the kind of music I want to make. Because I think, so often, the sitar is so closely synonymous with Indian classical music, which makes perfect sense. But the piano is also very synonymous with classical Western classical music… The instrument itself (whether sitar or piano) — with all respect to the heritage — also can be so many other things.

Q: Is it a balancing act, in that some people look to you as representing this very rich historic tradition that your father helped bring to the world? And at the same time, you’re kind of representing the future possibilities? If so, is that, is that easy or difficult, or neither, to do that?

A: I try very hard not to think in those ways, to be honest, only because, because there were so many ways of thinking that were kind of imposed on me from when I was very young. And because I do have quite thin skin and a people-pleasing personality, to some extent, I realized very early on — in my teenage years and early 20s — how very difficult and impossible it would ever be to try and fulfill any of those possible, really lofty ideals. Like, what does it mean to carry a tradition? What does it mean to break from a tradition? What does it mean to follow footsteps? What does it mean to live up to a legend? All of these concepts are so vague, in a way, and I could see as I traveled from one place to another that perceptions would change. You know, am I a torch bearer, or am I a tradition breaker, or am I a pioneer, or am I a silver-spoon kid? I just knew that would never work (to think that way).

Q: So, what did you decide?

A: I just got really, really clear that I have to work from a very internally led space of what feels truthful to me as a musician. And if it has that artistic integrity as a seed, then whatever it is I do will be alright, at least for me and at least for some people, and that’s all I can do.

Q: With regards to your album trilogy, when did you come up with a kind of “less is more philosophy,” musically speaking, if indeed you did?

A: It’s definitely something I’ve been leaning into in the last few years a bit more, so you’re absolutely right. I think that started for me on (my 2020 album) “Love Letters,” which — unlike this trilogy, which is completely instrumental — was all songs with guest singers. And so the narrative was so strong, in an emotive sense, that it felt really important not to dress it up with too many layers of complexity. So, on “Love Letters,” the instrumentation is really simple and I found myself really letting go — in a deeper way than I had before — and not feeling like I needed to tell convey things in such clever ways. I felt I could just be more vulnerable and more simple, that it was OK to just let a single note hang, rather than playing five trill notes around it. And it really changed the way I thought and felt through my instrument, which I think has definitely carried into the way I’ve been playing in this trilogy… We really set a template on that first album chapter, not just for the way I play the instrument, but also the sound world we create with the instrumentation in order to have that sort of immense space to it.

Q: There are some artists I have interviewed who, by virtue of playing the instruments they play, have inspired young people to do the same. Two examples would be the great jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and the terrific banjo player Allison Brown. The sitar is a lot less easy to simply take up in the way that one can acquire a drum or a banjo. But has there been any cause and effect? Have you seen younger artists who cite you as an inspiration?

A: Yeah, I have, and it’s genuinely mind-blowing. There are a fair number of messages I get on social media, from girls in particular, where they’ll say they picked up the sitar because they saw me play. I don’t have a lot of students, but one of my few current students that I teach was a girl I met a few years ago. And I’ll never forget it, because it was still at the time when everyone was wearing masks, and she had a mask covering her face, but just full tears in her eyes. I learned later from her mother that she’d basically, from when she was a little girl, taught herself to play sitar by watching my YouTube videos. That was just so overwhelmingly humbling and incredible… There is that kind of ripple effect.

Q: How hard a taskmaster are you as a teacher, compared to your father?

A: I think I’m pretty nice, actually! I teach a different way. It’s a very different time. And the few people I teach, they’re not living with me, like I used to live with my dad, and immersing themselves in the music (with him) for a decade or more before going out to make a career of their own. My students are already young adults having to live in this world and earn a living and be out and about, maybe doing gigs while they’re learning. So, they’re already operating in a very different kind of space where I have to think about: “How do I pass on the kernel of what I’ve learned? Why are they coming to me?” It’s because there’s something in what I do that they want. So I have to think about: “What it is that made me me in my father’s teachings?” I try and pass that on in a way that isn’t, you know, 15 years of immersive hours and hours together … It’s strange, actually, the process. But it also makes me think about my own music — and what’s important in it — in a new way, which is quite rewarding.

Q: In 1998, when you were 17, I was fortunate enough to interview you and your father together at your home in Encinitas. At one point the two of you discussed how you were introducing him to music he wouldn’t have heard otherwise, including techno and heavy metal. Have your sons, Zubin and Mohan, introduced you to any new music?

A: My older kid, Zubin, who’s turning 14 in a couple of days, constantly plays music at home. He listens to a real mix of things. I heard Chappell Roan, Charli xcx and Tyler, the Creator through him. He also listens to a lot of old jazz and a lot of ’90s music, like Weezer.

Q: At the end of 2019, you wrote a social media post in which you stated: “Over the last ten years I got sober, got married, had two boys, lost my father, made five albums, did at least six hundred shows, and saw my marriage (to film director Joe Wright) end. In the last year alone, I moved house, got divorced and had a hysterectomy, all whilst touring, single-parenting and releasing new songs.” How are you now, and how did you find the strength to get through all that?

A: There’s definitely been chapters (in my life) that have felt like shedding skin and coming into newer, stronger versions of myself, as a result of the stuff that came before. I guess one answer to how I am now is (I’m) very much in the place I’m meant to be. I feel like I’m in my strength. I’m in my early 40s and, as a woman, I know myself more than I ever have. I’m deeply privileged to raise the two kids that I have, and have maybe an even closer, stronger relationship with them than I would have had in a different situation. You know, our little family of three is really powerful. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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