‘AMAZING TO SEE INDIAN ALBUM COMPETE WITH MAINSTREAM WESTERN MUSIC’
Music comp oser Ricky Kej the says Grammy 2023 no d for his album, Divine Tides, is something he hadn’t anticipated
Ricky Kej’s Divine Tides is adding an Indian touch to the Grammy Awards 2023, as the album has been nominated in the Best Immersive Audio Album category. The music composer, though ecstatic, admits that the nod has come as a surprise.
“I wasn’t anticipating it at all. Around 12 at night, I started getting a lot of calls from Los Angeles, and I realised I’ve been nominated for a Grammy,” Kej tells us, adding that he has already started planning his trip to the US for the ceremony in February next year.
For the Grammy gong, Kej and Stewart Copeland, his collaborator and founder and of the rock band The Police, are up against singers Christina Aguilera, Anita Brevik, DJ duo The Chainsmokers and so on. To be nominated alongside some of the “biggest acts in the world”, the composer says, is “pretty amazing”.
“We are competing against mainstream artistes. Ours is an Indian album, with completely Indian music. The soul of the album is north Indian and south Indian, with classical influences. It does feel quite amazing that an Indian album is actually competing with mainstream Western music,” says the twotime Grammy winner.
As the Bengaluru-based musician gears up to jet off to the US for the Grammy Awards ceremony, Kej hopes Indian artistes stop chasing western influences to get international recognition, and that is the message that he wants his outing at the award ceremony to reflect.
“Indian artistes feel that in order to achieve international recognition, they have to do English music or do Western forms of music. That is not the case. I am a living proof of that, so are Pandit Ravi Shankar (late sitarist) and Zakir Hussain (tabla virtuoso). The way to get international recognition is to always stay true to yourself and dig deeper into your roots to figure out who are you as a musician,” he says while wrapping up.