In Shayan (Amala Records), US-based pianist Charu Suri’s recent album, the flow of the notes is without any sharp edges or emphatic crescendos. The strokes from the world of Indian classical evening ragas move slowly along a touch of jazz as if they understand how fragile one’s attention is at night, aware how easily sleep can be disturbed.
Shayan (which means ‘to sleep’ in Sanskrit), says 49-year-old Suri, was written for her mother, who could not sleep after her father passed away, and for herself, a musician who no longer knew what time zone her body belonged to. Then there was the constant anxiety of violence and war around her which added to the fatigue.
“I have been touring nonstop for the past two to three years. The geopolitical climate has been nothing short of exhausting. I saw so many people suffering, not being able to sleep, including my mother. There’s been a lot of anxiety, PTSD and tears. It made me realise that I had to slow down, look at music differently, approach it with a perspective of healing and therapy. I wrote this album as a balm to heal everybody, starting with myself,” says Suri, on a very early morning Zoom call.
It’s 4.30 am, her time, and Suri is unmistakably upbeat. Speaking about her seven-track album, which is competing at the Grammys this year in the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, a feat that places Shayan alongside works created for concert halls, streaming platforms and active listening. She is nominated alongside music giants Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda and Antonio Sánchez (BEATrio), jazz duo Bob James & Dave Koz (Just Us), electroacoustic duo ARKAI (Brightside) and jazz pianist Gerald Clayton (Ones & Twos).
On February 1, Suri will walk the red carpet at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, in the hope of bringing home the hallowed gramophone. But she is happy to note that the honour of reaching almost the top is already hers. Suri, besides Shayan, is on two other nominated albums, including Siddhant Bhatia’s Sounds of Kumbha and is a performer and composer on Peruvian singer and songwriter Flor Bromley’s children’s record, Herstory.
Born into a south-Indian family in Madurai, Suri’s given name was Charu Surinarayan. “Unlike what is assumed, I am not from a Punjabi family,” says Suri, whose initiation into music came from her grandmother, a veena player and Carnatic vocalist. In addition to the constant presence of music at home, there was a strong culture of listening, which was as important as learning. Mandolin U Srinivas and L Subramaniam concerts were a part of her childhood.
Suri was five when her father took up a job as the CEO of a record company in Nigeria and the family moved. At home, there was an upright piano and Suri just began tinkering with it one day. “My mom says that I just never stopped,” reflects Suri, who adds that her father’s diverse music preferences — from Beethoven to Abba to Michael Jackson to Miles Davis — also influenced her choices. She took piano lessons for about four years before the family repatriated to India after the military coup in the country.
The family moved to Chennai and this is where Suri found Gita Menon, a piano teacher, who was pivotal to the way Suri took to playing music and a way of thinking that would quietly alter the course of her life. “After I studied with her, I was reading orchestral scores at nine, I was transcribing. I could compose. I could write everything. It’s a very unusually high level of training. It was like being in a boot camp for pianists,” says Suri, whose life revolved around Chopin and Debussy. As for Carnatic music, that happened concurrently and Suri says she wasn’t very good at it. It was something she “had to do”. So much so that she felt like “an imposter” whereas with piano, felt natural.
Album cover of Shayan
At 17, a scholarship from Princeton took her to an academic and musical environment that expanded both her training and her sense of what composition could become. It is here that she met cellist Yo Yo Ma and bassist and composer Edgar Meyer and composed music for them. Their mentorship didn’t just validate her ideas; it gave her the confidence to take risks. “They told me ‘You are a composer and this is what you were meant to be do’. And I thought they say that to everybody but they were genuinely saying it. They took my pieces and they really put all their heart and soul into it. And it taught me such a valuable lesson: about humility and greatness and always being respectful,” says Suri.
A lot of Suri’s recent work uses Western classical music as the base and draws heavily from jazz and Indian classical music. Jazz came to the musician only about five years ago, after a trip to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. She rolled her sleeves and decided to study the repertoire and jam with the others. This is where she decided that ragas had to be a part of the fold.
As for questions of authenticity, in a world where disparate concepts of melody and harmony merge, Suri says, it depends. “I have always said I’m a composer of jazz and modern music, borrowing from our traditions. So I think that’s what my music reflects,” says Suri, who debuted Shayan last year at the prestigious Carnegie Hall.
Suri, who lives in New Jersey with her husband and 13-year-old daughter, and runs a music school, continues to take classical lessons on Zoom from Jaipur gharana vocalist Rachana Deshpande, who is based out of Toronto so that she can keep broadening her understanding of Indian classical. “If I’m doing raga jazz, I have to honour both. These are just two very independent and hard traditions. I have put in years of work doing that to make the music sound seamless,” says Suri, who is evaluating a ton of collaboration offers besides a new album titled Bossa Raga, which will enmesh the Brazilian rhythms with the Indian ragas.
Suri will also be performing in Mumbai later this year and continues to harbour the dream of composing for a Bollywood film. “I really admire the work of AR Rahman. I hope I get to collaborate with him one day,” says Suri, who is all set and hoping for her quiet whisper of an album to find its moment of ultimate recognition.
Curated by Aisha Patel
