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Feature/Interview
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Examiner- New York, Feature/Interview >>
Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon's surprise world music Grammy album nomination
January 14th, 2011 4:41 pm ET
And the artists nominated for the Best Contemporary World Music Grammy are: Béla Fleck, Bebel Gilberto, Angelique Kidjo, Sergio Mendes and…Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon?
Yes, Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon's Om Namo Narayanaya: Soul Call, recorded in Calcutta and New York and self-released on her own Soul Chants Music label, is up there with the big-time nominees. And that's with hardly any airplay and minimal publicity--and it's only her second album!
Adding to the mystery, the eight songs on the disc were composed around a single eight-syllable chant--"Om Na Mo Na Ra Ya Na Ya"--said to be over 6,000 years old.
"These syllables are literally vibrations from the ancient Vedic tradition handed down from generation to generation, and correspond with eight vital centers in the body and form a protective armor around it," explains Tandon. "All of the songs have the same chant, but it's mindboggling how they all can sound different, with different beats."
The songs also vary in that each begins with two or three different lines from ancient Sanskrit texts, Tandon continues.
"They're all verses of surrender," she says, expanding upon the healing qualities of the chant. "Many traditions have incredible healing mantras, much like Gregorian chants and any great music. I can't say how they work, but if it makes you feel better instead of taking antibiotics, why not?"
Clearly, Tandon's Soul Call has been making people feel better, as evidenced by the 25,000 Facebook fans from around the world who have signed on since her page went up two months ago.
"They write supportive and passionate messages and stories of how the music has affected them," she says. "Like one woman, who said she has a two year-old daughter who only calms down when they play my CD for her."
But Soul Call has also reached the Top 10 on theiTunes World and Amazon World Music charts--and has even placed high on Amazon's Christian music sales lists. It's also buoyed sales of her 2005 debut album Soul Mantra: Om Namah Shivaya at Amazon.
"I made it as a personal gift for my father-in-law's 90th birthday," Tandon says, "and it was released commercially in London when a friend heard it and suggested I take it to the Navras label there."
This followed what Tandon calls the "ephiphany" she experienced nine years ago, when she realized that the happiest moments of her life "had to do with music" and that she needed to return to it.
The New York resident hails from Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu on the southeastern tip of India and a major center for the country's Carnatic classical music style.
"Music was all around, and I sang before I could speak," says Tandon, whose mother was a "brilliant" veena (Carnatic lute) player and teacher. "After the Grammy nomination was announced, people emailed and remembered a song I sang in 10th grade and how moved they were then--and I didn't even know it! I always focused on studies and work life."
Tandon, who sang in school choirs, also plays veena, as well as guitar and tambura (an Indian drone lute).
"I had a couple years of classical Carnatic Indian training, and sang classical Carnatic, film music, whatever came on our radio," she says, citing Western music influences including Cliff Richard, Roberta Flack, Neil Young, Engelbert Humperdinck, The Seekers, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, and The Beatles. "I knew the White Album from the first line to the last!"
In 1975 on her first trip to London, she bought solely discounted albums. And having taken French lessons in school, she also absorbed French artists including Jacques Brel, Francoise Hardy and Algerian exile Enrico Macias.
But pursuing a music career was not considered "proper" by Tandon's family, so she excelled in business school and came to New York in 1979 with $24 in her pocket--and a job with the prestigious McKinsey management consulting firm. With her first pay check she bought a $1,200 Martin guitar--before buying clothes--then slept on the floor for six months until she could afford furniture.
But she eventually became a company partner, then formed her own financial consulting company. Then came her epiphany.
"I woke up one day when my daughter was starting high school and realized that though I had reached many measures of business success, I had not connected with my deepest self, my life's purpose," says Tandon. "I went on a journey going back to who I am: I asked myself what makes me happy, and it struck me that all of my happiest moments in life go back to music! I needed to pursue my passion for music and share it with everyone."
Her journey involved traveling the world in search of local musicians, local recordings, local sounds. She also returned to India frequently for study with classical music masters. And she began composing. "One morning I woke up and had five outlines in my head," she recalls. "But I took a good amount of time in making them meet my standards of being elegantly simple and easy to remember and sing--and got the most amazing group of musicians to record them."
Soul Call involves over 30 acoustic Indian classical and folk instruments along with Western instruments including vibraphone, acoustic guitar and bass. Musicians include Tejendra Narayan Majumdar, master of the sarod (a Northern Indian Hindustani classical stringed instrument) and the album's orchestral arranger; flautist Rakesh Chaurasia, nephew of flute maestro Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia; and mandolin player Snehasish Mozumder.
"The idea was to create something that everyone can sing--even if you don't know Indian music," says Tandon, who composed each song to follow a different raga, or Indian classical music mode. "I wanted to make a simple chant accessible and joyful, to become a shared celebration of music--and that's what I'm seeing in the Facebook response: 25,000 fans of all demographics, nationalities, races, religions. Everyone talks about how the music makes them feel--not the Grammy!"
In fact, her "nobody" status as a Grammy-nominated music business newcomer is a plus, Tandon feels.
"It inspires people to focus on the excellence of music and follow the dream," she says, adding: "When I listen to good music I reach an inner part of myself--an inner grace that allows me to be happy and radiate that feeling elsewhere."
To this end, Tandon serves in leadership and advisory roles at New York University, Yale and the American Indian Foundation. Her nonprofit Soul Chants Music initiative has partnered with many organizations in the fields of community building, arts and spirituality; all proceeds from sales of Soul Call will benefit these groups.
Tandon is also spreading her music via the Hindu Community Choir outreach program, which she formed in 2009 as a means of combining western choral and harmonic traditions with ancient Indian chants and ragas and bringing together a community in music. Additionally, she leads chanting sessions at meditation and yoga retreats.
Her "driving theme," she notes, is an admittedly new age-sounding "circle of love," which expands outwards from the chants.
"It sounds highly corny, but I've redefined my own mission of what I have to do: To help other people every day in some way, shape or form," she says. "I care deeply about not making this part of my life be about me. There's a beautiful Sufi mystic saying: When it’s all about you the divine disappears, but when you leave the divine takes over. So my quest should be to lose myself."
But she did make one concession to the mainstream music business.
"Most of the chants are seven or eight minutes, so the studio people said I had to have at least one thing for radio, so we made a three-minute radio edit," she says. "I didn't even know the concept of a radio edit! But the irony is that not one radio station played it. Everyone is listening to the long tracks!"
She acknowledges the "miracle" of her Grammy nomination, but notes that "to get the whole concept, you have to journey into yourself."
"You need time to relax," Tandon concludes. "It's not an 'outside' listening experience. The music needs to get inside you--and lead you deeper inside yourself." 01/14/11 >> go there
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