Ashwin Batish (center), with his sister Meena, who has been singing with him since they played Beatles songs together as kids, and son Keshav, who plays drums. Along with Myron Dove on bass and Murray Low on keyboards, they’ll performJan. 30 at the Kuumbwa in Santa Cruz.
When Ravi Shankar died just over a year ago, at the age of 92, he was the most famous sitar player in history. Shankar was the worldwide ambassador of the instrument, and a symbol of its ability to blend with and transform music across genres and around the world.
He was also a huge fan of Santa Cruz’s Ashwin Batish. And the respect was mutual.
“Absolutely, he was one my big influences,” says Batish, a cup of black tea with milk sitting in front of him in the cozy front room of Batish’s, the all-things-Indian shop that has been a fixture on Mission Street for decades. “Not just that, he was a great friend of the family, and a big supporter of what we were doing. I really appreciated all his spirit.”
At this moment, like many others, almost all of said family can be found somewhere in Batish’s. Sitting next to Ashwin is his son, Keshav, a 16-year-old drummer who like his father was a child prodigy. Keshav plays in his father’s band, and both of them will be on stage at the Kuumbwa on January 30 for a show billed as Ashwin Batish’s Sitar Power. They will be joined by Ashwin’s sister, Meena, a vocalist whose solo CD Ashwin also produced. Meena is at this moment working at the front desk at Batish’s, while his other sister Surendra flits between rooms. Only the two of Ashwin’s three daughters out doing after-school activities are conspicuously absent.
This whole family affair was begun by Ashwin’s father, famed Bollywood composer Pandit Shiv Dayal Batish, and his mother, Shrimati Shanta Devi Batish, a musician who started Ashwin on the dholak drum as a child, and on the sitar at age 12. After moving from Mumbai (then Bombay) to London in the early ’60s, at the height of the elder Batish’s fame, they relocated to Santa Cruz in 1968, after UCSC math genius and chaos theory pioneer Ralph Abraham discovered Shiv’s writings on Indian music, and convinced him to take a teaching position at the university in Santa Cruz.
“When he came here to Santa Cruz, it was like going back home,” Surendra says of her father, “because in Bombay we lived in a suburb called Santacruz, on the west coast.”
Shankar was a contemporary of Shiv—they played many of the same concerts—and had seen Ashwin’s career catch fire with the release of Sitar Power, the 1987 CD that proved to be Ashwin’s breakthrough.
In many ways, Ashwin and Shankar share a very similar legacy: they both turned new audiences of young people on to the sitar at times when its true potential had been all but forgotten. Shankar did it in the ’60s, through his association with the Beatles. Ashwin did it two decades later, by fusing the sitar’s unique sound with contemporary rock—and a full spectrum of other genres—and backing it with insane variations on Indian rhythms that had DJs of the time spinning his “Raga Rock” and “India Beat” records on the dance floor.
But by the time the two actually met, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium in 2007, Ashwin’s father had passed away a year earlier, leaving him at a creative low point. Shankar would have none of it.
“He said to me, ‘I hope you’re still playing sitar,’ and I go ‘no, not too much,’” Ashwin remembers. “He turned around, and goes ‘You must not stop playing.’”
“When Ravi Shankar demands you don’t stop playing,” says Keshav, “you don’t stop playing.”
Plugging In
Shankar—and the rest of the world—first got a taste of Ashwin’s transformative skills on Sitar Power, a groundbreaking work in every way. With the far-ahead-of-their-time breakneck rhythms on songs like “Bombay Boogie,” many assumed Ashwin was not just a sitar virtuoso, but also a technological wizard. Now, however, the truth can finally be told.
It starts in the mid-’80s at Union Grove Music on Pacific Avenue, where Ashwin bought an amp for $50, so he could play at the same volume as the jazz groups that were asking him to sit in.
“That was not on my mind at all,” he says of the cool that he would quickly bring back to the sitar. “I was just wanting to put this instrument in people’s faces. The thing is, everybody sitting down [during shows] was always working on my mind. I thought ‘This is a grooving instrument. I really want to get the people up, and have them jumping.’ That was my dream. The first time they danced to it, it was electrifying for me. It was like, mission accomplished.”
He soon took his vision to a new level of technological capability—with disastrous results.
“I saw this drum machine—the Drumulator,” he says. “I picked one up, and I think I spent like $6000 bucks on a recording machine. I brought it home, and I had no idea how to run any of this stuff. None of it. It was a ridiculous learning curve. I was like, ‘why in the world did I spend all this money?’”
So he abandoned all of it for an entire year, until an impending gig opening for Santa Cruz indie breakouts Camper Van Beethoven—and the unavailability of his band for the date—forced him to crack open the machines’ operating manuals, and discover a way to put his backing tracks onto cassette. In the process, he discovered a whole new sound, but technological wizardry played absolutely no part.
“I made a loop, which sounded good, and then I just kept pressing the buttons until it sounded halfway decent. I said ‘okay, I’m never going to learn this,’ so I just pressed that loop thing—I had like eight loops going—thak, chicka chicka chicka, thak—and I just started playing with it. That was ‘Bombay Boogie.’”
That song would lead off the Sitar Power album, and be a defining opening statement.
“If you actually listen to that drum loop, it’s just chaos,” says Keshav. “But man, that chaos sounds good. It’s something that a drummer with four limbs working at warp speed can’t even do. If you look at the MIDI track, it’s ridiculous. It’s congas, it’s drums being channeled at the same time, and then bongos and triangles coming in at these weird times.
“What he had that people hadn’t really delved into—specifically with orchestrating and doing fusion stuff— is the rhythmic side of Indian music, Northern Indian music especially. The Bhangra beats, the traditional rhythmic knowledge. He had already studied tabla before sitar.”
Dinner Music
If it sounds like Keshav is a leading expert on his father’s work, well, he got an early start.
“Every beat, every melody line—when I’m driving him in the car, two years old, he’s just singing it out,” remembers Ashwin. “Five or six of my albums, he had them all down, note for note. He was the Sitar Power Kid.”
“They’re stuck in my head. I can’t get them out. Every single one of his albums,” says Keshav. “You play the first two notes and I can dictate the whole song to you.”
There are some interesting parallels in the way Ashwin and Keshav developed as musicians. Ashwin came into his own as a sitar player in his early 20s, when he came to Santa Cruz with his family. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, before it was established as the Batish Institute of Indian Music and Fine Arts, Batish’s was an Indian restaurant run by the family, and it had a small stage onto which he and his dad would jump many nights to practice while diners ate.
Now, “serious” is not a word necessarily associated with Ashwin. He is a habitual joke-cracker, even in the studio. “Sometimes he has me laughing so hard my voice tires out,” says his sister Meena. “And then he says ‘OK, tea break! Calm down, calm down.’ He just has us laughing so much, and that tells you something: he’s really enjoying what he’s doing.”
But those nights jamming with his father taught Ashwin something about taking his playing seriously.
“Since I’m playing in front of 30, 40 people every night, I haveto be serious,” he says of his nightly sets in the restaurant back then. “I see if I am really slacking, people are eating, making clankety-clankety-clankety noises. But if I’m playing seriously, everybody’s stopping and looking. So there’s that intense 15-year period of me and dad on stage, just jamming away. That was like university, and it was where I felt like I had gained some power playing the sitar.”
Now his son has a drum set in Batish’s, and the same way that Ashwin absorbed his father’s influence, so has Keshav absorbed his. Like Ashwin did in the mid-’80s, Keshav is now out gigging with jazz groups, hearing new sounds and bringing them back to incorporate into their work.
“Growing up in this house was an ear training experience for me. Going and playing jazz now, I’ll just hear something and I’ll play it back out. It’s Indian music that developed my ear. It’s an oral tradition,” says Keshav.
Their music, meanwhile, is as eclectic as ever.
“The problem we’re having now is: what do we classify ourselves as?” says Keshav. “The thing with our music is it crosses so many boundaries, but the beauty of it is it’s ambiguous. You can make it whatever you want. And [Ashwin] makes it whatever he wants. He’ll do a song in R&B, he’ll do a funk song, he’ll do a soul song, he’ll do a country song, and he’s jumping back and forth all the time. Even in the classical stuff, it comes out.”
This is a problem that Ashwin has been dealing with since his exposure on mainstream rock radio first got him into big record stores.
“I would say ‘Where are they putting our stuff?’ And I’m looking around, and it’s ‘Other,’” he says with a laugh. “I would pick it up and put it with Eric Clapton, or the Beatles. I’d take my own albums and move them around.”
Keshav even had his own Camper Van Beethoven experience. First trained (like Ashwin) on the tabla, he played with his father at the Independent in San Francisco, opening for the reunited Santa Cruz band. He was still very young, but it energized him in the same way that Ashwin had been when he first saw people dancing to his sitar playing instead of studying it.
“We went to open for them—I was like 9 or 10—at the Independent club,” says Keshav, “David [Lowery, Camper’s lead singer] was in the audience, and he shot a cell phone video that’s on YouTube. I played tabla then. That was my first experience with an audience jumping up and getting really excited about us playing on stage. That was the turning point for me in my head that ‘oh, this music actually really moves people.’”
The rest of the family sees the resemblance. “He’s just like Ashwin, and my dad,” says Surendra of Keshav. “They would play just about everything, and he’s also getting that way.”
“Keshav will be the first to tell you,” says Ashwin. “Now we are like one in the heart.”
Ashwin Batish’s Sitar Power
Thu, Jan 30, 7pm, $15-$20
Kuumbwa, Santa Cruz
