When Maria sang, “how do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” within the Sound of Music, she was in all probability speaking about Harini Iyer. Her hair is slicked again with a pastel bandana and a flowy shirt. Her look, as simple as Sunday morning, with a vermillion bindi firmly on her brow.
This bindi or pottu, part of the Tamil Jazz Collective brand, is a nod to her Tamil roots whilst jazz has given her wings. Singing as her musical alter ego, Ella Subramaniam, the journey to synthesise this distinctive Carnatic-jazz sound has been a decade within the making.
Harini, a software program engineer with a Masters in Engineering Management from the US, , credit her feminine gurus along with her musical metamorphosis. Her mom initially “pushed her to formally study Carnatic” and guru Akhila Siva is the soul behind her love for her Carnatic sound.
Back in 2014 whereas within the US, Harini collaborated with Krithi Rao, creating the duo Harmonic Flaneurs. The artiste’s journey started with performances of Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ at numerous open mics. She learnt audio manufacturing and frolicked furthering her craft at Berklee College of Music in 2018, the place her mentor Lisa Thornson noticed Harini had a pure predilection for Flamenco music that by some means synced along with her Carnatic roots. This journey to Tamil jazz has clearly been lengthy and eventful.
Harini explored this distinctive Tamil-jazz confluence with Ella Fitzgerald’s monitor ‘Misty’. She says that it’s an train in vocal manufacturing, the place you’re taking any piece of music, and add your mom tongue to it to produces sure tonalities. “To me singing jazz in English sounded plain, I’m not Ella Fitzgerald. You can only explore that music with empathy, it is not instinctive. I felt a lot more confident and grounded singing in Tamil,” she says. Harini taught on the Nepal Jazz Conservatory, however by some means “she’s a Carnatic singer,” didn’t fairly match, and neither did she really feel a full embrace with solely her jazz persona. One had to meet within the center.
Creating a Collective
The Tamil Jazz Collective was born throughout the previous few months of 2024, with Sahib Singh and Shylu Ravindran , artistic forces behind the fusion band, Jatayu.
Sahib Singh says new sounds normally discover a blended reception in India. “Earlier, when I had performed across South-East Asia, they were far more accepting of our experiments, than the Indian audiences. Off late, we find more crowds who come with an open mind, and enjoy the music even if they don’t understand the language.”
With an unique Tamil model of ‘Take Five’ by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with the unique lyrics penned by Brubeck’s spouse Lola and carried out by Carmen McRae in 1961, the collective has obtained blended evaluations on-line. Purists are calling out their fusion music, whereas others can’t wait to attend a live performance, collaborate and even host them in Louisiana, the birthplace of jazz, soul and the blues.
Performing in Kerala, Chennai, Bengaluru, Coimbatore and Goa, Harini, Sahib and Shylu, plan to broaden the collective with an eclectic group of musicians, probably including a “string section, double bass, horn section, saxophone, and ultimately a full orchestra, when the budgets accommodate multiple collaborators,” provides Sahib optimistically.
Currently Harini interprets English lyrics of jazz songs into Tamil. However, “just translation doesn’t work sometimes because the metaphors and cultural context are different,” explains Harini. The collective has distinctive musical preparations that even enable impromptu collaborations at numerous venues and cities.
Harini’s musicology encompasses classics like ‘Summertime’ , ‘All of Me’ and ‘It Could Happen to You’ apart from unique compositions. As the collective strikes ahead, it has ambitions to, make Chennai a hub for cross-cultural collaboration, says Sahib, whereas Harini is in Berlin in the mean time to examine filming musical compositions, whereas additionally performing with a number of ensembles at numerous music venues throughout town (Community Chai, Music Pool Berlin and Sofar Sounds Berlin). The trio is presently booked for performances throughout India by way of 2025, and is eager on releasing their music on streaming platforms this 12 months.