What is Carnatic Music?
Carnatic music is a centuries old classical form from Southern India. It is based on ragas: there are thousands of them, and each one is like a melodic universe unto itself. Carnatic music is highly rhythmic, and spiritual too. A lot of the stories it tells are pulled from Hindu and Vedic scriptures.
On a more visceral level, Carnatic music is very much sung from the gut. You use your full voice. It’s like water or air to me. Carnatic music has been there from when I was born and shaped the way I view everything.
Have you ever questioned your love or appreciation of the form? Sometimes kids want to rebel against things that their parents have introduced them to…
It’s a very technical, complex form. I definitely went through a period of disillusionment with it. It felt like this big iceberg that I was up against and that I couldn’t get perspective on. There were two paths I could take: I could let go of the form and shift my focus to writing my own music, or I could go through rigour of chipping away it on a daily basis. I chose the latter, and I’m infinitely better for it.
R&B was also a big influence on you when you’re growing up, right?
When I was a kid, we’d go back to India most summers. One summer, we stayed in the U.S. and I was bored out of my mind. My parents got me a small FM radio with headphones, and I just wandered around the suburbs with it. One day, I discovered a local jazz radio station. That was what introduced me to jazz, BB King, and the blues.
That was right around the time when sites like Limewire were popping up, so I started downloading a lot of Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway, and Aretha Franklin—old school soul singers that had beautiful textures to their voices. For the first time in a Western form, I heard vocal inflections and embellishments that reminded me of Indian Classical music. There was also the same deep, raw soulfulness that I felt when singing Carnatic music. This idea helped me build a bridge between my two cultures.
Did you ever feel torn between these two cultures?
Every time I’d go to India there was always a period of adjustment—I needed time to adapt back to cultural cues and so on. Then, when I came back to the States, I felt like I was different to everyone else.
In 2010, when I was at Berklee College of Music, A. R. Rahman won the Best Score and Best Original Song Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire. He’s from Chennai like me and we speak the same language. For the first time, someone that looked and spoke like me was being celebrated at the highest level in the West. It was a big deal for me. Funnily enough, he gave me my break in Indian films a couple of years later.