L Subramaniam arrived in California in 1973, a heady moment for what was being called “East-West fusion”. Subramaniam, who played on Shankar’s iconic 1974 album Shankar Family & Friends, would spend the first decade of his career building on that legacy with a string of improvisational Indo-jazz records, incorporating Carnatic ragas and African-American rhythm to create a style he liked …
Amrit Ramnath clearly doesn’t think much of the canons of the music world: in his realm, music is many, and to conform to one means losing out on several others. Carnatic music surely forms his core, but he doesn’t carry it everywhere — neither in terms of his personal aesthetics nor with respect to music. Though I respond to other …
About seven years ago, to inhabit the culture, consciousness and chaos of Carnatic music at its epicentre — Chennai — G Ravikiran, a Carnatic musician from Bengaluru, and currently a senior manager at Cisco, moved lock, stock and barrel, with his family — wife and two young children — to Chennai. “It is very hard,” admits Ashwath Narayanan, a Carnatic …
