The band Karyshma has reimagined centuries-old Indian folk songs of hope and unity. Karyshna talked to us about their new EP, someday.
What are your fondest musical memories?
Gaurav: Each of us in Karyshma has deep imprints of the time spent with our teachers. For instance, I remember all of us sitting at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on 27th and Lexington in New York City late at night when the great Indian classical music maestro Ustad Sultan Khan suddenly started singing “Nadi” (a song included in Someday). The late night, his heart-wrenching rendition, the song itself… it felt like we were born on this earth to be in that moment. Great masters make memories.
We pay homage to such memories when the four of us are playing live. Our music is improvisational and the band is the audience. On stage, a moment like hearing Falu spontaneously launch into an idea, seeing Soumya lost in a song, or watching Sandeep take a risk never taken before, lights me up.
When we are live on stage, we are truly alive.
What do you consider to be the essential elements of your music?
Sandeep: There’s a great line from Jon Stewart: “I did not understand music until I started to yearn.” In Karyshma, we talk about miracle moments that Gaurav just spoke of earlier, like listening to the notes of Ustad Sultan Khan or Yo Yo Ma’s or listening to the golden words of John Prine or Mirza Ghalib. It connects us to the unspoken.
What are these moments and why do they appear? We’ve extracted three essentials that we believe all musicians work toward: the story, the search, and the surrender. Of course, you’ve got to put in your 10,000 hours to refine your basic musical craft, but the music manifests only once you have found your own voice and when you wield the music to tell your story. Second, what moves us all when we hear the great artists is their intense yearning. It draws us in. Karyshma’s music is about that incessant wanderlust and search. We’re not sure if we will ever find what we’re looking for, but we might understand each other better in that journey. Finally, all music is at its core about surrender. Surrendering to the song, surrendering to your teacher, surrendering to something greater than yourself.
Of course, these are ideals we strive toward in Karyshma’s music. We are woefully aware that we fail more often than we succeed. We may never succeed. And yet, the pilgrimage continues.
What kind of musical training did you have?
Falu: Karyshma arrived at its weird genre-warping crossroad by no deliberate design precisely because of the four distinct paths of musical training. For instance, I started training in Indian classical vocals when I was six. I feel that music flows in my veins.
Sandeep is a student of the great Tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain (and don’t get him started on “Zakir ji”, you won’t be able to shut him up!)
Soumya grew up in Texas and spent years learning with Western classical violin.
Gaurav, another Texan, started his training in piano and then switched to Indian flute and vocals.
We do bring more diverse influences than most bands we know. The unique baby called Karyshma is the result of four parents.
Your music has Indian roots and also American music influences. How do you balance both and what’s new about your type of fusion?
Soumya: It is true that those two influences dominate the direction of the band. From its genesis, Karyshma has written songs that range from folk rock in English to songs in Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati that adhere to traditional Indian ragas and scales. At times, we have written only instrumentals. It’s a natural and organic outcome of what each of us brings to the band’s creative pallet. The fertile land where these rivers meet, that’s where Karyshma plays.
We cannot claim ours is a “new” type of fusion or even that we are fusing Indian and American music at all. When we write “American” songs, we don’t try to fuse ragas in them and we don’t stack harmonies when Falu is singing a beautiful prologue to a raga. Sure, all music is about creating something new from the old but when we write our songs, we care deeply about remaining authentic to the influence we channel. We keep meandering as long as it takes and stop only when the song lands in a place where all four of us can stand behind it.
The songwriting goal is not to carve out a portion of our music to be “East” vs. “West”. Those notions are outdated. Instead of trying to strike a genre balance, we look for ways to harmonize our four opinions and apply our own internal filters to find what the song needs. There’s no point pretending or hiding behind affectations. If we can’t bring that authenticity, it’s not worth doing it.
Tell us about your new EP Someday and the type of songs you included there.
Sandeep: Interestingly enough, Karyshma was in the midst of working on an album of our original songs and recorded seven scratch tracks when COVID delivered a gut punch to the world. Since we live in four different cities across two coasts, we couldn’t continue on that album. One day, on a depressing zoom call, an idea struck: why not go back to our vault and pick old Indian songs that all four of us grew up listening to and loving? Why not share the same solace and spirit of that music with the world in this current moment?
After a lot of internal debates, we plucked five songs from the reservoir of thousands to tell a story that is both timely and timeless. These five songs capture the universal emotions of love and loss, connection and separation. We wanted to remain hopeful that whatever the world is going through today will be behind us someday. And that’s when Falu came up with the name of the album. From that fateful zoom call through the release, it took us 31 days (and sleepless nights) and teams in six cities to land the plane.
Musically, these songs also represent five distinct traditions from South Asia. “Barjori” for instance, is a song composed in an Indian raga Bhairavi. “Bhooli” is a Sufi ghazal— a poetic form that originated in Arabic regions in the 7th century. “Bheegi” is an old semi-classical song Falu learned from her teacher when she was a child. In many ways, this EP is Karyshma’s most personal work to date, which is fitting in the midst of the current impersonal, alienating, socially-distanced era.
Who plays on Someday and how did you all come into contact with each other?
Falu: All four of us Karyshma bandmates play and sing on the album, with some of us playing several instruments. We also invited our friend Mark Tewarson for atmospheric guitars and soundscape.
Karyshma was born through random accidents that weren’t meant to be (the band name Karyshma, by the way, means serendipitous miracle in Urdu). For instance, it was 6:05pm when Sandeep missed his train in Boston and ran into Gaurav on that train station. If Sandeep had in fact caught the train, we would have missed the making of the band! Soumya showed up at a concert to fill in for a violinist who called in sick with stomach flu and that’s how he became Karyshma. No stomach flu, no Karyshma! I remember bumping into Gaurav at a random concert in Mumbai when he was visiting India from NYC. What are the odds of that? But here we are!
How are American audiences reacting to your music?
Sandeep: Internally, we called it the “Someday Experiment,” because we were not sure if releasing an entire EP in Hindi was a good idea. It was unclear how it would be received by the American audiences who do not have the context. The South Asian and Indian cultures aren’t that “foreign” in the U.S. anymore, but the language hurdle would have been tricky. After discussing for days, we decided to roll the dice and release the EP of non-English songs, if only to test whether the maxim that ‘music has no language’ would hold water.
The risk paid off and we have been pleasantly surprised by the deluge of positive reactions. American audiences have discovered the same sense of mystery, reflection, and solace in these songs that we found. Of course, we’re painfully aware of the selection bias here, because we only hear from those who like our music! 🙂 That said, the Someday Experiment continues to suggest that music can indeed help break the barriers of language and connect us to our universal human emotions. We humans are more similar than different. In the end, there’s only one story.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you in terms of work and livelihood?
Falu: As the old proverb goes, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet.” Lives and livelihood all around us have been disrupted by the pandemic but at least the four of us in the band are relatively blessed and the disruptions have not been terrible. I get to hear at least one or two stories on a daily basis about the creative colleagues and friends who are gig-less, locked-up, and at times depressed. It’s heartbreaking. Our personal experiences pale into insignificance compared to the pain millions have suffered through, with a mounting death toll and the economic suffering for the millions trying to make ends meet. All four of us hope that 2021 is the year when the world goes back to its original human rhythms that we’ve been used to.
What have you been doing these days while there were orders in many states and counties to stay home? In what ways are you promoting your music?
Gaurav: In Karyshma, all we care about is stealing as many moments as we can to be together, making music with each other. The band has always been geographically distributed across two coasts. While we don’t get to meet up as often as we did because we don’t have the concert tours, we have had enough of a muscle memory to collaborate remotely over the last decade. Currently, we are busy promoting Someday. Reaching out to folks on the Internet, spreading the word through our PR firm and spreading word of mouth. We are working on shooting a music video for one of our songs so stay tuned for that arriving in early October. Falu also does a lot of social outreach, which is great because she’s way more social compared to the rest of us hermits.
We have already started talking about our next album and the current plan is to begin working on it in December.
If you could invite musicians or bands to collaborate with, who would it be?
Soumya: That’s a long list! 🙂 We have always enjoyed working with Kenwood Dennard, Tony Grey, and Mark Tewarson in the past. Their craft continues to inspire us. We wish we could collaborate and learn from folks who’ve left us, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and John Prine. Ustad Zakir Hussain, John Mclaughlin or Tom Waits would be our dream pick. Although I won’t technically call it “collaboration”. Just being in their presence would make our music better!
More about the band: newkaryshma.com
Author: Angel Romero
Angel Romero y Ruiz has dedicated his life to musical exploration. His efforts included the creation of two online portals, worldmusiccentral.org and musicasdelmundo.com. In addition, Angel is the co-founder of the Transglobal World Music Chart, a panel of world music DJs and writers that celebrates global sounds. Furthermore, he delved into the record business, producing world music studio albums and compilations. His works have appeared on Alula Records, Ellipsis Arts, Indígena Records and Music of the World.