For University of North Texas alumnus Aakash Sridhar, the journey to jazz — and his debut album, Revived Emotions — started with the tabla and few chances to improvise.
“I was not into the concept of improvisation,” Sridhar said. “But we had a different kind of improvisations.”
Sridhar, who is from Bengaluru, India, grew up with a mother who teaches Carnatic singing, a classical and popular form in India that uses ragas, an improvisational form, and talas, a rhythmic base.
It might seem like an ocean away from the sultry, swinging sounds of the oldest jazz clubs in the French Quarter or the vibes in the coolest joint in New York City. But the distance is bigger in miles than in imagination, something that Sridhar put to the test as an emerging jazz pianist. In the process, the young musician found a second home for some of his earliest memories and the feelings they invite back into his mind and keyboard.
Like most musicians, Sridhar said he learned his hardiest lessons at his mother’s knee. Carnatic singing is sort of a signature sound of India, with its lilting, bending phrases that fall as easy as water.
“I used to learn a little singing from her,” Sridhar said. “She introduced me to this concept of the alap singing.”
An alap is the opening of an improvised vocal or instrumental run, often performed at a slow tempo to set the mood of the improvisation to come. Sridhar explains it as a musical phrase anchored by an unchanging key.
“You’re just using a specific set of notes to improvise on that tonal center,” he said. “So we have to follow specific rules, and not go out of that scale, which is called a rag. The rag defines the rules. But then later I came to know jazz, when I was much older.”
He grew up playing the tabla, a two-piece percussion instrument. The instrument includes a small, high-pitched drum played with the right hand, called a dayan, that provides the treble tones. The larger, lower-pitched drum played with the left hand, called a bayan, provides the bass tones. He started studying the keyboard at age 8, which he calls a late start.
Sridhar said North American children often start playing instruments through piano or keyboard lessons, as do children in South Korea.
“But it’s not the same in India, it’s very different. It’s mostly singing,” he said. “The singing culture is very predominant, like Carnatic and Hindustani music. A lot of them pursue that. And then there’s digital keyboard, a lot of them pursue that, and then tabla is also a popular instrument. So the culture is very different. So I think that’s why I got into the piano very late.”
Sridhar was a teenager when he attended a workshop at the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music in Chennai, India. Sridhar was studying computer science and was in his school band that won a prize in a cultural festival. Part of the award was free tickets to the workshop.
“This workshop had major international jazz artists coming,” he said. “That’s when I started becoming open about the idea of improvisation. I was around 18 then. And then after that, I spoke a lot to them how to get started. They told me about the real book of jazz standards.”
The musicians he met told him to start studying easier songs, and to immerse himself in jazz.
“I followed that,” he said “I listened to a lot of recordings for two years.”
He had a job but left the company to focus entirely on music. He earned a spot at Berklee College of Music.
“All the people I met there, that completely changed my taste,” Sridhar said “It took me more in the direction of jazz. A lot of the friends I made were major jazz heads. I discovered that this is the direction that I like going in.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Sridhar returned to India. As the world came out of pandemic lockdowns and losses, Sridhar said he started looking at master’s degree programs, and he wanted to go to a school where he could get more education and training in jazz and could grow as a musician. He had a list of 50 programs, and the UNT College of Music was on it.
The big draw was the college’s legacy in jazz studies and in students who went on to make music and win Grammy Awards. When he learned that UNT had embraced a growing South Asian student body, the college moved up on the list.
He got into the program, and studied under UNT jazz piano faculty member Dave Meador, who has been as productive in the recording studio as he has been in the classroom. Sridhar said Meador allowed him to customize his degree so that he could focus on studying, composing and recording.
Sridhar said he learned quickly that most graduate students in jazz studies are working to get into the college’s top ensembles. The storied jazz studies program has highlighted those ensembles, such as the One O’clock Lab Band, and the late Dan Haerle’s keyboard program — which was called the Zebras until it was rebranded as the Commercial Music Lab — as reliable pathways to the performing and recording industry.
But Sridhar wasn’t on fire to make a top ensemble. By the time he reached Denton and UNT, he was ready to improve his playing, get more confident as a composer and build a body of work.
“So my vision was a bit different, and I had already talked to Dave about that. I would need to thank him because I never did a single jury exam in all my semesters. He exempted me every time because I just told him I would [record]. He allowed me to do a recording instead,” Sridhar said. “So through that, I kept composing, recording, composing, recording and eventually toward the end, we did two more tunes where I worked with him. And then I did two more tunes by myself after graduating, and I compiled it into a whole album. That really helped that Dave gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do.”
What he wanted to do came together in Revived Emotions, a six-track album that uses music and memory to build a sensitive record that allows Sridhar to turn the piano into both a backup instrument and the lead “voice” that drives melody through complex rhythms.
He enlisted his contemporaries in the jazz program to make the record, with Andrew Getman on guitar, Adam Abrams on bass and Joshua Ferrell on drums. The quartet recorded at Crystal Clear Sound Studio in Dallas.
Sridhar said he used the music to recollect and reclaim emotions, making Revived Emotions a record that considers his childhood in India, where his family moved every few years and he had to make new connections and fit in all over again, to his present, which has been about finding a place in America and within a uniquely American art form.
The debut reveals Sridhar in full possession of a commercial ear — he knows how to make music pretty and engaging — and an artist’s appetite for curiosity. Revived Emotions goes down easy, but Sridhar isn’t afraid to take chances, either.
“I like to think harmonically first, and then the melody steps in later,” Sridhar says of his composing.
In one of the record’s standouts, “Sunsets,” Sridhar said he started with a series of chords.
“I had a simple idea, and then I tried to translate it through different chords, keeping it cohesive,” he said. “And so, in that way, I was trying to maintain the theme, the main motive, and I like a song, even if it’s jazz, I like it to feel more like a song structure.”
Revived Emotions is well stocked with songs that sound complete, yet ripe for a singer to come in and pick up the pianist’s melody with a flash of poetry and soul. Sridhar’s maiden voyage into recording challenges that habit jazz has of fading into ambient music, something that bumps inoffensively in the background.
Tracks like “Sunsets” and “Stop Chasing” could be at home on a cinema soundtrack, thanks to a strong and personable point of view, sonically. “Stop Chasing” showcases Sridhar’s talent for finding a rhythmic pocket and his interest in melody. His drummer’s hands, trained up on the tabla, find just as much texture at the piano, if not more.
Sridhar said he thinks his approach, wanting songs to have a hook that makes the listener dig in, might go against the grain just a little in contemporary jazz composition — though it’s worth noting that the UNT jazz studies department includes the inimitable Richard DeRosa on its faculty, an artist who coaches students to keep the listener’s heart (and their tapping feet) in mind when composing. UNT might aim for the highest technical mastery, but its jazz program was largely born on the bandstand, where the musicians got to see how hard the kids would swing on the dance floor.
“It’s not, I think, a popular opinion,” Sridhar said. “A lot of [composers] like to dissolve, like modern jazz, into something that’s very aesthetic, and you have to kind of look for where that ‘thing’ is. But I like my songs to have a strong chorus. Something that hooks people.”