Brooklyn-based Arun Ramamurthy is at the cutting edge of fusing jazz and Carnatic music in the U.S. Born to immigrant parents who moved from India to New Jersey, Ramamurthy grew up learning the violin in both Western Classical and Carnatic styles, before choosing to focus on the latter.
With a keen ear for all kinds of music and a special affinity for jazz, it was a matter of time before his mastery of Carnatic violin melded with the improvisational freneticism of jazz, finding an outlet through the Arun Ramamurthy Trio.
Ten years after their first album Jazz Carnatica, the Arun Ramamurthy Trio – comprising Ramamurthy on violin, drummer and percussionist Sameer Gupta, and bassist Damon Banks – released their latest offering New Moon, on the Greenleaf Music label.
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The album is a musical tour-de-force, but it also has a moving story behind it:
“This is really a suite of songs in honor of my family and ancestors, and all the people, all of our ancestors, people that have made sacrifices for me to be where I am,” said Ramamurthy in an interview with India Currents Community Reporter Tanay Gokhale. “Because for me, to have the opportunity to study traditional Carnatic music 8000 miles away from India in a serious, deep, authentic way, is a blessing.”
Edited excerpts below:
Going back to your childhood, how did music happen?
Arun Ramamurthy (AR): Music happened since I was a child. My mother is a Carnatic vocalist, so she had students coming to the house to learn Carnatic music from her. I would see that every day and I started learning the basics of Carnatic music when I was six or seven. That was vocals.
With the violin specifically, I started Western Classical violin first when I was eight, and I continued till I was 16 or 17. But around the time when I was ten, I started Carnatic violin too because I found a teacher named Ananta Krishna who lived in New Jersey, close to where we lived. So that was really the beginning.
Tell me a little about the history of the violin in Carnatic music – how did this Western instrument become a staple of Carnatic music?
AR: The violin is a European instrument, so it came to India with the British around the late 18th century and early 19th century. At the time, there was a great Carnatic composer Baluswami Dikshitar, who is given a lot of the credit for adapting the violin for Carnatic music. Adapt is not exactly the right word because the instrument stayed the same, but he modified the tunings, and the posture is different too as we sit on the floor.
It’s fretless and the spaces between the notes is small, so you can bend and slide the notes, which is essential. Most, if not all, the instruments in Carnatic music and in Hindustani music, are trying to emulate the human voice – we call it the gayaki anga.
The violin being a bowed instrument, you can sustain notes. You don’t have to catch your breath, either like in the case of a flute. So in many ways, it’s an ideal instrument for Carnatic music.
So it has a history that goes back, maybe 250 years, and then it evolved so much in the hands of great musicians. It was an accompanying instrument for a very long time, and then violinists like Mysore T. Chowdiah, V. V. Subrahmanyam, M. S. Gopalakrishnan, and Lalgudi Jayaraman made it even more of a soloistic instrument.
Q. Going back to your journey with the violin, you said you started playing Western Classical, and then started training in the Carnatic tradition – at what point did the two worlds collide?
AR: Throughout my high school life, they were separate. I didn’t have any issues or confusion with technique in either, even though the tuning is different in both styles. When you’re young, you’re so adaptable to different things that it doesn’t enter your mind, so I could keep them very separate.
When I went to college, I discontinued Western classical because I felt very restricted by the rules of Western classical music. Although Carnatic music has a lot of rules, we improvise often, and my teachers were talking to me about expression, about telling stories with your music, and it’s all your creation, in that moment. So I gravitated more towards Carnatic then.
Simultaneously, I listened to a lot of hip-hop, and of course, jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis. So I was listening to all this other music that I felt very connected with, but then the only output that I was able to put out was traditional Carnatic music.
Then – I would say in my early twenties – I started to very consciously and proactively try to make connections between the world of Carnatic music and the jazz music that I also enjoyed so much.
Interestingly enough, around that time, I went to India and spent a year with my gurus, Mysore Nagaraj and Mysore Manjunath and lived with them in their house. While I did a very deep dive in Carnatic music, I think I was also ripe and ready to see how that could help me evolve as a musician.
When I came back, I was playing traditional concerts at the highest level I could, but also was seeking out opportunities to create connections with musicians that did not come from that background.
Was the plan to do music full-time after you came back from India?
AR: Music as a career wasn’t always something I thought was possible. I did work a day job, in software, I was a quality assurance engineer, and that brought me to New York City. And while I was working, I was also really expanding and playing with musicians from different worlds.
I started playing with dancers in New York City. Around 2006-07, I met Trina – now my wife – who is an amazing violinist and we also have a project together. I also met Sameer Gupta, the drummer in my trio. It was very intentional – I needed to find people to make this music that was in my head come to life, and realize it.
Just to be fair to the fact that this is something that’s so important to me, I should probably immerse myself in it as an adult, so I gave myself a chance to see what it could be. And then ultimately music just became vast.
It won out!
And that brings us to the inception of the Arun Ramamurthy Trio…
AR: It started with Sameer [Gupta] around 2010. I was working on a project with a dancer, and he was on it too, and that’s how we met. He was playing a barebones drum kit, just a hi-hat, a snare, and not even a bass drum I think.
We had good chemistry, and we decided that we should play together. I would just go to his place in Harlem, and we would just shed and try stuff out. We listened to jazz records, and we also listened to Carnatic records, because his background is in Hindustani music, not necessarily Carnatic.
It was getting pretty cool and I was like, “Man, this should be a real band!”
Perry Wartman was an upright bassist who I already knew and he’s got one of the most beautiful tones you’ll hear, so he joined us on our first record. I forgot to mention that it started out as a quartet actually because we also had a mridangam player Akshay Anantapadmanabhan, who has since moved to Chennai and does Carnatic music full-time
We did a series of shows and concerts and that’s how it started, but for me, the goal was that I wanted this music to pull me out of my space, and challenge me and give me an opportunity to find things that I didn’t know I could do. I was into that, and I still am.
With Samir and Damon [Banks, the current bassist], I hope for them to push me and to do things in the moment that I don’t expect, and then I like to see how I react to it. It’s a fun game!
The band’s second release New Moon is inspired by your own family’s story. How did it come about?
AR: With this record, it started with a story which is a little bit different from what I’ve done in the past, where it’s been just about music. When I started taking notes initially before composition, there was nothing musical about my note-taking; it was remembering stories of my grandmother, of my grandfather, of my family, my parents.
So this is really a suite of songs in honor of my family and ancestors, and all the people, all of our ancestors, people that have made sacrifices for me to be where I am. Because for me, to have the opportunity to study traditional Carnatic music 8000 miles away from India in a serious, deep, authentic way, is a blessing.
I wanted to try to capture that, and that became an overarching idea to get things rolling. How do I translate that into music? How am I going to make people feel that same feeling? Am I going to have that same feeling when I perform this music?
Each of the four pieces in the suite have their own story behind them right?
AR: Yes, the first is called “Bangalore to Brooklyn”, and that is literally about my parent’s journey from Bangalore to the United States. My father has written a lot of stories and articles over time based on his experiences and my family’s experiences during his time as a civil engineer in Brooklyn. The first book that he published is called Bangalore to Brooklyn, which is where the name comes from. And it kind of encapsulates just the driving energy of movement, and with that a sense of excitement.
The second piece “Aaji” is just a humble prayer to Aaji, my maternal grandmother. It is a heart crying out for another person, it’s as simple as that, and it’s supposed to feel that way. She is the only grandparent I knew and I saw her every time I visited India or she visited us in the States. Also, she was a big fan of Carnatic music and was my biggest fan! She would always say, “nobody can sound like you, except for you.” And that is a beautiful sentiment to tell any artist.
The third piece “Mirrors” is really about self-reflection. It’s about being multicultural, growing up in America, being Indian, the challenges, and the question, how do you move forward? Even me making this music: is it going to be more Carnatic? Is it going to be more jazz? You don’t have to decide in the end, and that’s what I’ve figured out. But those questions that I asked myself, and I’ve been asking myself for 25 years, and now I realize, “God, you didn’t have to do that!”
On a similar note, the final piece “Amavasya” is about getting to a point of understanding, but there’s still confusion in it. There’s nothing in it that’s perfect. [The piece] goes to really weird places that feel dark, but that’s life. But then there’s also energy to it, and it also gets to sunny places, and that’s life too!
Listen to the Arun Ramamurthy Trio’s latest release New Moon on all major music streaming platforms.
