L. Shankar
Shankar Lakshminarayana (born 26 April 1950), better known as L. Shankar, is an Indian violinist, singer and composer who also goes by the stage name Shenkar. Early life, family and education Shankar was born in Madras, India, and raised in Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka), where his father V. Lakshminarayana, a violinist and singer, worked as a teacher at the Jaffna College of Music. He learned to play the violin and first performed in public in a Ceylonese temple at the age of seven. In 1969, he went to the United States, where he studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University. Career After performing with various Indian singers for several years, Shankar founded a trio with his brothers, L. Vaidyanathan and L. Subramaniam, that performed throughout India. While attending college at Wesleyan University, he met jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Garrison, and John McLaughlin. With McLaughlin, Shankar founded the group Shakti in 1975, one of the early groups in which Eastern and Western musical traditions met. They released three albums: Shakti (1975), A Handful of Beauty (1976), and Natural Elements (1977). After the band dissolved, Shankar was a violinist with Frank Zappa for a short time, and then founded the group The