Indian music has been recognised all over the world. It’s just that the kind of Indian music that has been recognised is not the kind of music we ourselves are listening to. In India, film music is predominant. It rules our charts, sound systems and Spotify playlists. But when an Indian composer or a singer goes abroad for a concert, those filling up the stadiums are only people from the Indian diaspora. Bollywood music has gone all over the world but not actually broken cultural barriers; there are probably only a few songs in that area and you can count them on your fingers. The people who have actually broken cultural barriers are the classical musicians. I remember seeing a Ravi Shankar concert when I was 19 in the Bay Area and I was shocked that the demographic of the audience was representative of the demographic of the city itself. That stayed with me. I realised that in India, we’ve got something known as the Ravi Shankar syndrome. Everybody knows who he is, which instrument he played, that he won the Bharat Ratna but can anyone name one of his albums? He has created more than 70. We know him as a personality but we don’t know his music. So much so that a lot of these artistes such as Ut Ali Akbar Khan and Ut Zakir Hussain get more respect outside of India. We ourselves are not appreciating our music.
That said, film music for generations, has been a soundtrack to our lives. Did you never want to veer towards it?
I was never keen on doing mainstream music. In India, most of the music is either a love song or an item song or a party song. When I tell people I’m a composer, the first question I’m asked is, which film have I composed for. The only kind of music I make is about a strong social or environmental message. A lot of people ask me that why do I not create mainstream music and get that popularity and then use that to make my own music popular. But then my legacy would be defined by that popular music, which would reach far more people than the music I love. I’d rather be lesser known, but for songs that define me.
You had a poster of Stewart Copeland, the founder of the British rock band The Police, in your bedroom while growing up. Was it intimidating to ask your idol to collaborate with you?
My whole life, I’ve been quite outrageous in my dreams. This was one of them. I won my first Grammy for an album called Winds of Samsara in 2015. For the next seven years, I wanted to follow up. But my touring schedule had become relentless and I couldn’t create new music. Then the pandemic hit and I started making the first pieces for Divine Tides. That is when I realised that I needed a strong collaborator, somebody who I could bounce off ideas with. And I thought why not reach out to Stewart Copeland. At the worst, he was just going to say no. To my astonishment, he loved the music. We ended up spending a year exchanging music remotely, him in Los Angeles, I in Bangalore. We didn’t even meet until a few days before the Grammy ceremony in 2022.
Divine Tides stems from your interest in environmental activism. How did your fascination with nature come about?
All of my life, I’ve been two things: a musician and an environmentalist. Even before I knew what the meaning of the word environmentalist was, I was one. I grew up in North Carolina — the first six years — and we had a home in the middle of nowhere with nature around. We had a lot of creepy crawlies that would enter our home on a regular basis and while my parents and teachers would tell me to kill these insects or lizards, my question was why did they exist if they were meant to be killed. Now we know that every single species, no matter how seemingly insignificant or dangerous, is an important part of our ecosystem. But these questions would keep me awake at night. Eventually music started off as sounds from nature — birds, animals, trees and flowing water, and then humans taking objects from nature and creating musical instruments like bamboo flutes and animal skin as percussion instruments. For me, music and nature are one and the same.
You’re also the UN Goodwill Ambassador. What is the scope of your work with the UN?
Besides concerts for the UN, I am helping them out with their advocacy and negotiations. I work with multiple agencies, one of them being the United Nations Convention to combat desertification, which works for combating the effects of climate change by ensuring that land remains fertile. Then I work with the WHO on their ‘Make Listening Safe’ initiative. WHO research shows that 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of the way they listen to music. So we work towards creating recommendations for governments. I also work with refugees all over the world who have been forced to leave their country because of their music.
Your father is a third-generation doctor and was furious at your decision to be a musician. In fact he insisted that you do a medical degree. How did music prevail?
When I told my father that I wanted to be a professional musician, there was a lot of drama at home. Finally, we reached a compromise that I would finish a degree in dental surgery and then my life would be my own. At the end of five years, I did not know anything in dentistry, but I got a licence to practice. I ceremoniously gave him the degree and told him that I wanted to be a musician. He never questioned me again.
You also had an extensive career with jingles with the TVS commercial created in your bedroom. What did those 13 years teach you in terms of discipline and learning. Do they continue to aid you even today?
They absolutely do. I loved that period. I did more than 3,500 commercials in a span of about 13 years. It was the greatest learning experience. The more commercials I did, the better I got at composing. It was like a workout. Every day was a different challenge. One day it would be a Tamil folk jingle, another day it was a Celtic jingle, working with different musicians and styles. I would constantly have to be on my toes to understand the different styles and genres around the world. That is why today, when people listen to my music, they say that it does not have a genre.
Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings have been integral to your albums. In today’s polarised world, where there’s so much division and war, how do you see the significance of Gandhi’s ideas?
Gandhi’s ideals are more relevant today than they ever were. He was a visionary, and would speak about the environment in the ’30s when environment was not even a concern. He would say that the moral compass of a nation is defined by how that society treats its animals. He also said that the earth has enough for everybody’s needs, but not everybody’s greed. And now we know that as the absolute truth. Or his idea that be the change you want to see in this world. That is a strong environmental message. We constantly talk about changing the world, but we so rarely talk about changing ourselves. It’s very important for us to go back to Gandhi’s teachings, especially today.
Composer and music producer Ricky Kej (left) in a conversation with Suanshu Khurana, Senior Assistant Editor, The Indian Express. (Photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)
You have publicly expressed your admiration for PM Narendra Modi. You also thanked him on the Grammy stage. Twelve years of his tenure, numerous debates and controversies and no press conferences; are you still his avid supporter?
I’ve made no secret of it that I absolutely admire PM Modi. When he became Prime Minister in 2014, I immediately saw a change. Culture and music and the arts were no longer looked at as some kind of a vague thing. It was looked upon as infrastructure and soft power. So much so that already within one year, there was a lot of curiosity for Indian arts and culture. It just increased manifold. And so for me, that mattered a lot. And after I won my first Grammy, PM Modi invited me for a meeting. He was going to be visiting the climate change conference in Paris later that year in 2015. He spoke to me about that speech and asked me for my opinion. He also told me to make an album, which featured musicians from all over the world speaking about climate change and the Indian philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family). I made this album called Shanti Samsara and PM Modi loved the album. He took many copies to the Climate Change Conference and gave them to all the world leaders. Since then we have shared a beautiful relationship.
When artistes speak on political matters, how important is it for them to question the leaders they support?
There is a difference between an activist and an advocate. Both are important to build a beautiful democracy. I consider myself an advocate. Even if there is a person who I absolutely despise or a person whose policies I do not understand or consider to be the wrong kind, I still believe in working with them — somebody who is democratically elected or has the power to influence change. I believe in having a sense of empathy even if I do not agree with what they propagate or what they do or what they say. It is better to have a foot in the door and work with people, rather than work against people.
AI is rapidly expanding into musical compositions but it’s a polarising topic for many artistes. You have been more optimistic with regard to this shift and are one of the few artistes embracing it without fear.
With music creation, AI needs to be looked upon as a tool. In the early 2000s, you could create extremely realistic sounds of the flute, of a complete orchestra on your computer. Everybody said that musicians are going to lose their jobs and you are supposed to work with real musicians. Every musician thrived after that. I can do an entire song using the computer. But I am limited by my own imagination. If I get a sitarist into the studio, they will use their musical knowledge, their life experiences and they will take my composition to a whole new level. As musicians, we have to pull up our socks and make sure that every single piece of music that we make, will have to be unprecedented. We cannot rest on common genres of music and be lazy with our compositions.
Composer and music producer Ricky Kej at Expresso. (Photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee) 
Composer and music producer Ricky Kej (left) in a conversation with Suanshu Khurana, Senior Assistant Editor, The Indian Express. (Photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee)
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