It really just resonated with me again. Once I started playing it and working with tabla players, getting more involved in Indian music and listening to it more and thinking about it more, I realised that it was something that was really inside me and it started to affect how I was playing, what I was choosing to write, how I was thinking about music, and so on.
inflections. So when I play Tagore songs I am playing them word for word as such. I have a recording on my first album of O Aamar Desher Mati where Tagore is singing about his homeland, his beloved Bengal and that is something I really wanted to capture. We have similar upbringings I see. My father is Gujarati and I was raised with North Indian music but more so we had Gandhi and, well, you can’t compete with that…[laughing]
Bengal is one of the major artistic centres of India for poetry, music and the sciences. I Well, we had Subhas Chandra Bose, the real wonder if you were particularly influenced by radical… Bengali music and culture. I have been exposed to the music of Tagore and specifically Ali Akbar Khan. Also Ravi Shankar has this close Bengali heritage as well. I know exactly what you are saying about the kind of love of poetry, art and music and it was always present in my life. When I was growing up I was introduced to Rabindra Sangeet by family and friends to the extent that the songs became very important to me. I couldn’t understand most of it because it was a quite high Bengali language but I always loved the
I wish we had more Gujarati musician references growing up because whenever we misbehaved in school or at home, my father would have us read Martin Luther King and Gandhi [Arun laughs] and the next two weeks at the dining table conversations revolved around our social consciousness readings. What impressed me growing up was, being a child of a Gujarati father while being raised in New Orleans, we were exposed to all sorts of music and my father strictly enforced Indian