This is the first time I’ve written something with the intent of putting it online for others to see. Despite maintaining a fairly regular journaling practice, I never seriously considered posting my thoughts online until recently. This is mostly for people interested in Carnatic music, but also for friends curious about what I am doing in India.

If you have questions while reading this, just email me and I can update to clarify. I acknowledge that it may be difficult for people not super involved with Carnatic terminology to read this quickly. I’ve tried to provide links here and there. Also, you can always use google if there is a term you are unfamiliar with!

Saxophone is a new entrant to the Carnatic music scene. It was the legendary Vidwan Kadri Gopalnath (1949 - 2019) who brought it to the mainstage, making it the third successful western instrument to integrate into Carnatic music. The violin and electric mandolin were the first two, popularized by Baluswamy Dikshitar (1786 - 1859) and U. Srinivas (1969 - 2014) respectively. I didn’t find a clean link for Baluswamy Dikshitar, so here’s a detailed Dikshitar family tree instead. Kadri Sir gave his first full-fledged katcheri (concert) in 1978, but only after studying with Sangitha Kalanidhi T. V. Gopalakrishnan, did he ascend Carnatic music’s greatest heights.

I’ve been learning Classical South Indian music for a while now. I began formal vocal lessons at the age of nine with Smt. Indhu Nagarajan in LA. I picked up the alto saxophone through middle school band and taught myself the basics of Carnatic music before coming under the tutelage of violin Vidwan Delhi P. Sunderrajan. I continued learning from him over Skype until April 2020. I must admit that while I enjoyed learning Carnatic music, it was never to the extent that I would regularly sit myself down to practice. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that skill-wise, I plateaued early on.

This next part is going to sound like a joke, but bear with me. On December 9, 2020 I woke up with a newfound conviction that I was going to restart formal lessons, practice every single day, and become a proficient Carnatic saxophonist. Unlike many “motivated” spells lasting a few days or weeks, this felt different. It was internal. I still can’t describe what switch flipped internally, but something definitely changed.

Given Kadri Sir’s untimely passing in 2019, learning from the source of Carnatic saxophone was no longer a possibility. That said, I was set on learning within Kadri’s bani (school of music). On December 9, 2020, I took to the interwebs to find disciples of his who would be willing to teach me. I found three main ones: Eluru Rambha Janardhan (E. R. Janardhan or ERJ), Prasant Radhakrishnan, and Sumanth Swaminathan. Figuring my odds of getting a response were highest if I messaged all three, I went ahead and did so. E. R. Janardhan was the only one to respond (and that too within hours of my initial message) and so on December 10, 2020 I embarked on a journey to get better at Carnatic saxophone.

In my very first class (over Skype) Janardhan Sir assessed my abilities and concluded that my foundations were shaky and my technique was not great. Initially I was annoyed. Ten minutes into my first class and he wanted me to throw out everything I had learned over the past seven years. It wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized I was only the next in a long line of restarts. Janardhan Sir told me that when Kadri Sir began learning from TV Gopalakrishnan, he too had to restart at the Sarali Varisai (very first lesson of Carnatic music).

Janardhan Sir’s road to restarting at the Sarali Varisai was a little more windy. Inspired by the meteoric rise of the prodigious Mandolin U. Srinivas, ERJ’s father sent him from his native town Eluru to Chennai at a young age to learn mandolin from Subbaraju (disciple of Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar). Years later after attending some of Kadri Gopalnath’s concerts, E.R. Janardhan decided to pick up the saxophone. To get familiar with the style of music, he attended as many of Kadri Sir’s concerts as possible and began to teach himself the basics. Within a few years he started touring around India as a up and coming saxophonist and even recorded albums. Soon he caught the eye of the maestro himself and came under the tutelage of Kadri Sir. Being self taught, he had placed shadjam, the note “Sa”, as “C” on the saxophone (“Eb” concert pitch). With 20 years of experience and intense experimentation backing his techniques, Kadri had placed shadjam (“Sa”), as “G” on the saxophone (“Bb” concert pitch). He had concluded it was optimal in terms of both ease of playing as well as the instruments musical range. The master’s reasoning triumphed and despite being a touring professional saxophonist, Janardhan Sir began again at the Sarali Varasi with “Sa” at the “Bb” concert pitch.

Why is this relevant? It really isn’t, but it’s an interesting enough side story that not only I, but my guru (teacher), and paramaguru (teacher’s teacher) restarted with the Sarali Varisai, the basics. As a side note, between 2013 and 2014 I played with fingerings that I had taught myself and had set shadjam (“Sa”), as “E” on the saxophone. It’s straight up random why I set it at that so your guess is as good as mine. Funnily enough, it is only after I found a video of ERJ teaching the basics on YouTube did I switch my fingers from “E” on the saxophone to “G”. This made things significantly easier, but it wasn’t until 2020 that my technique went through a revival from “oh what on Earth is he doing” to “wow that doesn’t sound horrible”. Here I am roughly quoting my sister and mother who both pointed this out sometime in the middle of 2021 (I had been playing for around four months at that point).

Fast forward to this past spring. I had been learning for 16 months at this point and had a solid foundation in Carnatic saxophone music, decent technical abilities, and a good intuition for Carnatic music (or so I thought). Much to the chagrin of each and every one of my roommates, I had played nearly every single day over the past 16 months. I say nearly because after about 200 days of daily practice, I needed to take a day off to travel. Since the habit had become so much a part of my daily life at that point, I figured that it would be ok to miss a day here or there. This combined with people (family and friends) begging me to not bring my saxophone on vacations.

By this point I had learned a lot. In eight months I had learned more than I did in the seven years preceding it. I have to point out here that this is 85% due to me, the student, and 15% due to the teacher. Both Sunderrajan Sir and Janardhan Sir were fantastic teachers, but the incremental improvements across daily practice compounded in way I couldn’t have imagined. I had been playing roughly an hour a day, which doesn’t sound crazy until I tell you that I probably played 20 minutes a week in the years prior. You always see the graphs (be it from Tim Urban or someone else) showing that 1% better everyday is 37x better in a year, but you don’t realize its power until you literally live it. And so I was living it. I could hear myself getting significantly better (though most roommates will tell you otherwise) as each month went on.

With around 3.5 weeks to kill between my college graduation and my start day (work), I figured I might as well ask Janardhan Sir if I could go live with him and his family and take in person classes. He responded affirmatively and I went ahead and booked my ticket.

Fast forward a few months and here I am, writing this post from his house in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh. It’s my first time in Andhra and I’ve used emotive hand gestures more often than spoken word to communicate with people here. Though it’s still South India, Telugu is the native language and is indecipherable to me, a Tamil and English speaker. Lucky for me conversing at home is made easy by the fact that both Janardhan Sir and his wife Asha akka speak Tamil and English (in addition to others). The same can’t be said for their adorable 2.5 year old, Jitya, who speaks a mix of general baby babble and Telugu.

The average day here is fairly intense and involves several hours of play. The day typically starts around 4:45 am and have 1-on-1 class with Janardhan Sir between 5 - 7 am. After this, he usually hops on Skype to take remote classes with students around the world, while I continue to practice for another hour or so. I break to go eat tiffin, usually idli or dosa. After this I lounge for a little bit, watch an episode of Netflix, or take a nap. Then it’s back to practice. After another hour or two of practice, I have class with Sir ( <= 90 min). Then break. Practice. Break. Night class. Sleep. All added together, I’ve been looking at about ~6 - 10 hours of saxophone a day, broken down into 4 - 5 hours of class and individual practice making up the rest. And yes. Going from 1-2 hours a day to 6 - 10 will make your mouth hurt. My lips bled. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Naively, I thought I was pretty good at saxophone. The reality of the situation is that I’m just getting started. Sometimes the skill gap between guru (master) and shishya (student) is obfuscated by the virtual medium through which most classes these days are held. For example, you hear your teacher play something and you repeat back to them. You think to yourself “hey yeah this is pretty straightforward. I got it first try.” But in doing so you miss a key point. It isn’t to get it right on the first try, it is to never get it wrong, period.

This probably sounds like it should have been obvious given that he’s a high quality professional saxophone artist. Every time I sit down with him to play, I am absolutely blown away by the level at which he plays. Despite not practicing regularly since Covid happened (large reduction in the number of concerts taking place), his playing is smooth like butter. Regardless of the ragam or krithis, the muscle memory kicks in immediately, producing music at a moments notice. Contrasted with my self-assessed “note playing”, everything he produces is magical. Each swara (note) is intentional and seldom are there errors.

The key difference between him and every other current saxophone artist is the degree to which he is able to smoothly mimic vocal music on the saxophone. Instead of treating the saxophones keys as binaries (either 0 or 1) which take one of two states (open or closed), he plays with gradients. Depending on the particular ragam, he oscillates the various keys in gradient-like fashion to precisely mimic the pitch modulations a vocalist would make by singing. Janardhan Sir’s approach has taken Carnatic music on the saxophone to a whole new level. In my opinion, it is a style of playing that surpasses the bani stylings of his guru, Kadri Gopalnath. Despite attaining a god-like status on saxophone, Kadri Sir was limited in his ability to carry out slide gamakams in “weightier” ragas like Nasikabhushani, Bhairavi, Thodi, and others. Janardhan Sir often noted that “it sounded like a harmonium” (discrete notes, instead of true gamakas), something he often says about my playing.

I learned many things across the past two weeks.

In terms of music, we covered the following pieces: second speeds of varnams (Mohanam, Abhogi, Navaragamalika, Thodi, Bhairavi), Kamalapthakula (in Brindavana Saaranga), Gurulekha Etuvanti (Gowri Manohari), Magudi (a composition of Kadri Sir), Raghuvamsa (Kadanakuthuhalam), Sudhamayee (Amruthavarshini), and Maha Ganapathim (Nattai, in progress).

On the saxophone specific side, I’ve been working on getting my single tonguing speed to 130 bpm, double tonguing, and playing cleaner gamakams and spurithams in various ragams. Initially I struggled to tongue clearly at 100 bpm, but I can now comfortably do so at 110 bpm now. Not a terrible increase for a couple days work. It’s definitely the first time I’ve sat down for extended periods of time with nothing but the mouthpiece and the neck in order to practice tonguing itself (ex. today I practiced single and double tonguing exercises for two hours straight).

I accidentally learned circular breathing, which shocked Janardhan Sir since it wasn’t something he had taught me. In fact, when it “clicked” I wasn’t even attempting to learn it. I was watching Breaking Bad, while practicing tonguing and took a breather only to move my mouth in the precise way to enable continuous breathing. Janardhan Sir chalked it up to the grace of the guru, pointing to the picture of Kadri hanging next to the pictures of his parents and Gods in the prayer room (where we play).

The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. I would put on a clip by GN Balasubramaniam, KV Narayanaswamy, MD Ramanathan (my favorite), Chembai, TR Mahalingam, or T Brinda, (this list is infinite so I’ll cut it off here so as to not bore you with more names than you can count) listen to it, and go “wow that was fantastic.” Brinda’s panchamam in Meru Samana is the clearest note I’ve heard in my life. GNB’s brigas are unparalleled. MDR’s absolute oneness with laya and bhakti. Here too I can keep going.

The point remains that I chalked it up to greatness and not practice. Sure innate talent and aptitude has a lot to do with the aforementioned generation defining masters, but the strong (extremely strong) likelihood is that it was accompanied by decades of rigorous practice. I had never “really” actively listened to recordings of the old masters. So Janardhan Sir had me do that. I sat down and actively listened to recordings of KV Narayanaswamy. In an hour of this, I learned more about the essence of Shankarabharanam than I had done in several hours of attempting to play alapanai (rhythm-free soloing). This isn’t to say that alapanai practice and fluency over the notes isn’t needed. It’s just that it will be harder to reinvent interesting sounding phrases in Shankarabharanam than it is to draw upon the collective wisdom of masters who’ve dedicated their entire lives to the craft.

Love. If you aren’t in love with what you are doing, it’s going to be a long journey ahead. My relationship with music pre-2020 December and post-2020 December is completely different. My desires to learn Carnatic Sangeetham have only grown in the time. I attribute this largely to the fact that I genuinely love what I am doing. I’ve enjoyed playing Carnatic saxophone so much that the only things keeping me from doing this 10+ hours a day for the next few decades is the belief that I am capable of doing more good for the world as a builder of technology and my future roommates.

Obsession. You need to be absolutely obsessed with what you are doing. Janardhan Sir often says “you must practice like a rakshasa (demon)”. To briefly explain this, in Hindu scriptures, demons show the utmost devotion to penance, discipline, and Gods. I’m still trying to figure out if he was joking about me needing to play each sangathi (song line or variation of a song line) in a krithi upwards of 500 times. He’s probably not exaggerating.

Beauty. Approaching music with the goal of finding beauty makes it more fun. One of my favorite Sanskrit terms is Nada Brahma, roughly "Sound is God.” I take it as an observance of the spiritual side of the oscillations and vibrations in music, the one true universal language.

It’s a long road ahead. I came to India thinking I’d leave being able to play advanced topics raga alapanai, kalapanaswarams, and neraval, but leave realizing that I’ve only begun this journey. There is on the order of thousands of hours of practice, active listening, and deep study of Carnatic music before I’m able to create music. The distinction here is between playing notes and making music. I’m closer to the former than the latter. There are times where I really “feel” what it is that I am playing, but there is a long journey before I’m in a place where I constantly “feel” ~it~. Creating music is beautiful. Playing notes is boring.

The details matter. Do the hard things. In my years before meeting Janardhan Sir I developed I lot of bad habits. Unwanted gamakams. Bad finger technique. Bad embouchure. Here too the list is long. It’s difficult to undo these habits, but I have reversed a lot over the past 18 months. Now it’s ensuring that the changes are permanent. On the other hand, there is a clear duty to properly reproduce the music you’ve been taught. “Creative freedoms” as a concept, doesn’t exist until you are at a sufficiently advanced level. Sometimes I ask Sir to simplify difficult gamakams in Magudi, Raghuvamsa Sudha, or the notoriously difficult Bhairavi Varnam, Viriboni. His response is always “no.” The point of doing difficult things is partially that they are difficult. In properly doing it, you exercise discipline and diligence. An easier gamakam takes more away from the krithi than it provides. The substitution is a short-term gain, but a long-term loss. You can now play the krithi, but haven’t done the hard work. Now what will you do when the next item you learn in the same ragam requires that particular oscillation? I asked to simplify a few gamakams in the Viriboni (Bhairavi). He said no. I said ok. I did the hard work and learned the gamakams. A little while later I learned Shyama Sastry’s famed composition “Amba Kamakshi” (Bhairavi). It was significantly easier given the carry over of gamakams.

Trust. You need to wholly and completely trust your teacher. When finding teachers, this is often a factor that gets overlooked. When Janardhan Sir teaches me something, I do not doubt it. This is not to say that you shouldn’t ask questions. Sometimes I have questions about minor details like bits of sangathis or layam (rhythm), and these are resolved quickly. You need to accept the fact that they know a lot more than you think and are drawing from decades of knowledge. In this regard, I don’t really question which song he decides to teach me next or what gamakams he has me learn in particular ragams. To see the picture from the puzzle pieces you need to have a lot of assembled puzzle pieces. The teacher often has this perspective, while the student is busy trying to acquire individual puzzle pieces. Trust that your teacher can take you where you want to go.

What? A conclusion already? Yes. It had to happen. I know the entire post is rather jumbled and convoluted, but I put off hitting “publish” for a week so I could “make it better.” This led to intense procrastination and I figured I would just add a few sections, put it up, and then publish more posts to cover gaping holes from this one.

I wrote this to not only update my friends on what I’ve been up to, but also to write more about the process of learning music, getting better at things, and preserving culture & traditions. When we see music videos on places like YouTube, the masters are always absurdly good. Yet, there is nothing preserved from their journey. There is no video of MD Ramanathan singing before he went and learned from Tiger Varadachariar. There is no video of Ed Sheeran singing mediocrely before his career took off. I think there is a lot to be learned from this uncovered section -- between beginner and expert.

I’m still thinking about this, but specific to Carnatic music, there isn’t a great way of preserving the centuries of knowledge accumulated within individuals. Janardhan Sir has a lot of anecdotes about learning from Kadri that he’s mentioned to me, but if never written down, will surely fade. For example, prior to last week, I’d never heard of Kadri restarting from Sarali Varisai when he met TVG or ER Janardhan restarting when he came under Kadri’s tutelage. Small details like this can and should be preserved by the current artistes and students.

But you say “Suraj, surely you’ve heard of lec-dems!” The concept of Lec-dem serves to meet these needs, but so only partially. There’s only so much you can cover in an hour or two. Technology can help us preserve things and I feel that the Carnatic scene has failed to properly embrace that. If more musicians blogged about their learnings, teachers, and various related components, it would hands down contribute to the richness of our shared culture. I’m still figuring that one out, but in the meantime I figured I’d start a blog. “Be the change you want to see.”

If absolutely anything I’ve written about is interesting, feel free to email me at surajsrivats0112@gmail.com. I’m happy to go into deeper detail about anything here in a future post and finding out what to focus on can easily be determined by what you personally find interesting. I anticipate I’ll be writing a lot more about music, Carnatic music, saxophone, general learnings, tech, and a whole host of other things.