You could say that Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon has led two lives. In one of those lives, she is a successful businesswoman, doling out advice to corporate executives and sitting on the boards of major financial firms. In her other life, she is a virtuoso musician and vocalist whose recordings are beloved by many thousands internationally. Until recently—when her 2010 Soul Call album was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Contemporary World Music Album—Tandon’s business associates didn’t even know that she possessed such magnificent artistic talent. Meanwhile, most of her devoted fans today are undoubtedly unaware that Tandon is highly respected in the financial world.
Now, Tandon says, the music—a variation on traditional Indian ragas that incorporates modern Western elements—is her main focus. Her latest recording, Soul March, Tandon’s third and most ambitious album to date, will be released April 15, 2013, via her own Soul Chants Music label. Recorded in India and the United States, the nine-track suite, composed solely by Tandon, is based on a beloved Indian song, “RagupathyRaghava Raja Ram ,” sung during Mahatma Gandhi’s famous 241-mile Salt March, a 1930 act of nonviolent protest that paved the way toward India’s independence from Great Britain.
The Grammy nod has certainly brought Tandon—who plays several instruments, including guitar, keyboards,veena and tanpura—new and richly deserved attention. But she shrugs off the fuss that’s been made over her. “My dream, the reason I’m doing this, is not for fame or fortune,” she says. “Everything I do is not-for-profit. My objective is to get the recordings to people and to make sure that my concerts benefit something. I don’t do concerts commercially; I only give them to help a cause. My goal is to bring people into the music and to let the music find them so that they find themselves. They too have the music inside them.”
Tandon has always had music inside of her. From the time she was a child, growing up in Chennai, the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she absorbed all varieties of it, both Eastern and Western sounds. “I came from a very simple family in India and we had a lot of chores and I’d sing as I wiped the floors,” she remembers. “We had one radio in the house and it would be tuned to one channel and I’d sing whatever was played on that channel from morning till night, whatever the genre.” Traditional Indian classical music—in which she was trained—had a profound impact on her, but so did the music of the Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, jazz, R&B, Brazilian bossa nova. “My prism,” she says, “is a multi-cultural, multi-musical prism.”
Tandon’s accessible approach to East-meets-West is a hybrid compendium of all of the emotions and techniques she has drawn from studying and savoring the world’s myriad musical expressions. Her music has been called “medicine for the soul” and “a full-bodied revelry.” But what’s most remarkable about her story, perhaps, is that Tandon’s entry into the performing arts arrived well after she’d already established her preeminence in business. Although she’d always enjoyed singing—her chant-based vocalizing, in Sanskrit, English and French, is mesmerizingly rich and evocative—Tandon’s evolution into full-time artist occurred somewhat unexpectedly.
After graduating business school, Chandrika was offered a position at McKinsey & Company, a global management-consulting firm in New York. She arrived in the foreign land in 1979, dressed in a sari and nearly penniless. She worked her way up to partner and in 1992, she founded her own advisory firm. She also became involved in various humanitarian endeavors, and joined the Board of Trustees at New York University, co-chairing their global committee, as well as involving herself with the Stern School of Business and the Wagner School of Public Service.
While still riding high in the financial world, Tandon, who is married to financial executive Ranjan Tandon, with whom she has a grown daughter, began devoting more time to her love of music. She studied with masters in India and began composing her own music. She recorded her debut album, Soul Mantra: Om Namah Shivaya, in 2004, as a gift to her father-in-law for his 90th birthday. Soul Call: Om: Namo Narayanaya followed in 2009. Tandon says that it “wasn’t meant to be an album but it sort of happened. The music had to express itself and be laid down.” Comprising eight ragas, each based on the same 6,000-year-old, eight-syllable chant, the album used more than 30 different Eastern and Western instruments and spotlighted Tandon’s hypnotically soothing, alluring vocals. Its nomination for a Grammy—alongside such established artists as Béla Fleck, Bebel Gilberto, Angelique Kidjo and Sergio Mendes—took not only the artist but her business colleagues by surprise.
“The dean of the business school was retiring and they asked me to sing for his going away party,” says Tandon. “It was a shock to everyone. ‘You can sing?’ No one had ever heard that. A couple of people checked out my website and heard the album and there were shockwaves. My goals are very simple,” she adds, “to share with as many as I can. People write to me and they say, ‘I’ve listened to your CD 20 times,’ or, ‘My mother died and every day for six months she listened to the CD.’ I feel that some broader purpose was served.”
Soul March, which includes a choir as well as Tandon’s vocal performances and globally influenced instrumentation, is her most sophisticated and far-reaching to date. Ironically, the album came about almost on a whim. “I had a performance and I told my teacher that evening, ‘At the end of the performance I’m going to do the traditional Salt March song.’ It’s such a beautiful song, and it means so much. It says, ‘God of Goodness..you are an aspect of divinity. Give everybody wisdom.’ The next thing I knew I had several songs. Then we pretty much did it. But this time, the big difference is that these compositions led me more toward the rumba, more toward jazz.”
Indeed, Soul March exudes an overtly international flavor, still Indian at its core, but undeniably extending a hand to the other corners of the globe. “It’s not that I’m setting out to build a bridge,” Tandon says. “It’s the only thing I know to do. My life itself is a bridge. I live in America,with a deep involvement and appreciation of all things American - but I feel my Indian origins and culture intensely as well. My musical roots are multi-cultural, multi-country, multi-lingual and my spiritual orientation is multifarious. I really find myself when I’m doing music. Those are my happiest times. Sometimes I forget the world, I forget food and drink. Music nourishes me in a very profound way. Music is who I am, business is what I do.”
The theme of the new album, she adds, “is what I call seeking freedom: seeking the freedom to speak the truth. I think we’re all in the process of seeking freedom. The big activists and leaders, people like Martin Luther King, are always out there seeking freedom. In some sense my music is a tribute to all of them. On a smaller level, we are all trying to seek freedom, from whatever it is—freedom from stress, freedom from negative feelings, freedom to cross boundaries.”
In her day-to-day life, Tandon does all she can to further those goals. She has allowed non-profit groups to distribute Soul Call and use the proceeds to benefit their institutions. With her Soul Chants Music, a subsidiary of the foundation, Tandon has partnered with organizations in the fields of community building, arts and spirituality, using the transformative power of music to empower themselves and others.
She also works with a community choir, a group of seniors, in a Queens, N.Y., Hindu temple, “and it’s unbelievable,” she says. “It’s so enriching, it’s changed my life. It’s not about me giving back; I’m learning grace from them. These are traditional Indians—some are involved in the temple and some aren’t. They come together every Sunday and I do free classes. They sing everything from ‘America the Beautiful,’ which they’ve never learned, to all these innovative rhythms and harmonies. Indian music is not about harmonies so you have to teach them how to listen to different notes. In my ideal world, I would have a Harlem gospel choir version of Indian music. Eventually we’ll get there. Then my goal is to sign up other people who are doing similar things so we can help create music together across genres.”
Obviously, Chandrika Krishnamurthy Tandon has many goals. But what is so admirable is that they have little to do with her own personal welfare. “Where will I be in 10 years?” she asks herself rhetorically, then quickly, responds: “That is not my question. What I’m thinking about is, in the time that you have, with whatever gift that the universe gives you—which could last or may not be there tomorrow—what can you do to share it in the best way possible?”
And the best means she has at her own disposal to make that sharing possible? Music, of course. “To me, music is about going deeper and deeper inside. Music is not just about listening to something, not about meditation. It’s something that, at the end of it, you feel enriched inside having listened to it. That’s the music I choose and I think that’s what you’ll find with all the great artists. It’s a hope to try to get there.”
