Vocalist Sandeep Narayan on making the tunes of east and west meet

Carnatic classical music vocalist Sandeep Narayan reversed the aspiration game in the Carnatic classical music field when he moved to Chennai from Los Angeles after completing his education and training in music. Breaking into the classical music circuit in Chennai with an American accent and a western sensibility wasn’t a cakewalk, but his talent won over critics and criticism. He now has his sight fixed on the world music arena with feet firmly rooted in the classical music ethos. His wife Radhe is a Bharatanatyam dancer and the daughter of world renowned mystic, Sadhguru. City Times met the renowned musician from South India to know about his migration from the west and his trend-setting musical endeavours thereafter.

You grew up in California and started singing pretty early?

I am the youngest of three boys. My mother is a Carnatic classical musician and would conduct music classes with me on her lap when I was a baby. At four years of age, I started humming a geetam and my parents realised they needed to teach me. The interesting thing was, I grew up in North America to hip hop and pop music and on weekends it was Carnatic music with the family and community. Now they are finally coming together.

How many languages do you sing in?

Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi, English and Malayalam.

You’ve collaborated with folk and Hindustani classical musicians? Tell us more about it.

I met Parthiv Gohil at Isha Foundation and we jammed together. We then performed a fusion of a Tamil and a Gujarati folk song. Hindustani music exponent Mahesh Kale and I were at university together and that is when we discovered each other’s music. Last year we performed a jugalbandi on stage.

What is your next collaboration?

I am getting ready to release an EP on November 9 called Arul. This is a collaboration between me and Yanchan, a hip-hop producer and mridangam artiste based out of Toronto. Yanchan and I both grew up in North America but also grew up in households with strong interests in Carnatic music. We noticed that so many top 40 songs these days are a hybrid of different genres, however there was hardly any representation from the traditional Indian music scene, and pretty much none from the Carnatic space. Over some discussion, we felt it was time to showcase the possibilities of fusing Carnatic music with other styles. With Arul, we hope to show the world that we can bridge the gap between our tradition and listening trends of today, in a very accessible but fresh way. I also have a few Carnatic-Hindustani collaborations in the works.

Will you collaborate with your wife Radhe for a future project?

Although my wife Radhe has her own body of work and choreographs and performs her own repertoire in her Bharatanatyam performances, we have collaborated already in the past on some very small songs or slokas. I sometimes help her tune some pieces of music which she uses in her productions. However, I have not sung with her in a live show, and we aren’t sure if or when that will happen. Though we have been approached several times by event organisers to do a joint performance, we prefer to work with each other only behind the scenes and perform solo on stage. Behind the scenes collaboration already happens with us and will continue to happen. We are each other’s biggest critics and biggest supporters. So naturally, we contribute to each other’s growth as artists.

Are you keen on creating world music?

I just finished a week-long recording camp in the South of France with Lo-Fi and jazz producers. We are working on a compilation of Lo-Fi and easy listening tracks that will incorporate Carnatic vocals mostly in the form of improvisation. It is a very new space as generally Lo-Fi music does not have many vocals to begin with, let alone Carnatic. This is being curated as part of the Conscious Music Circle and Conscious Planet movement. The camp was educational and eye opening for me. It helped me explore how the Carnatic vocals can be interspersed with instruments like piano, trumpet, guitar, drums, and harmonica. It was very new for them to hear this style as well. They were fascinated with the concept of gamakams and singing the microtones between notes, rather than jumping from one note to the other. Keep an eye out for Carnatic Lo-Fi on streaming platforms coming soon.

Any specific song of yours that Sadhguru enjoys?

He is very encouraging. I did an Inner Engineering course before I got married and they asked me to sing and I sang Kaalai tooki ninran, which is my wife Radhe’s favourite song. A day before my wedding, Sadguru asked me to sing a song and I refused. My parents reprimanded me and I sang a Subramania Bharti song - Ninnaye ratiyendru ninakiren kannama. He has been part of my concerts too.

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