Hailed with helping rekindle worldwide interest in the sitar, Ashwin Batish is one of this year’s headliners at Għanafest. He tells this newspaper about creating cross-cultural music and living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle with The Beatles.

Ashwin Batish is best known for making Indian music more accessible to Western listeners by fusing it with many different styles.

He is also one of the very few musicians who has managed to imbue his music with electronic arrangements without losing the melodic mysterious sound so characteristic of classical Indian music, in which the sitar plays a vital role.

Here, he talks about growing up in a famous musical family and and how this helped develop his career.

You come from a musical family that was a celebrity in its own right. How has this affected your music and career?

In one word, growing up in such an environment was candy. How lucky can you be to have superstars for your mother and father? My parents were my only teachers and they made the whole process fun and natural.

I did not need to struggle or go far to learn. Music was always around me. My mother, Shirimati Shanta Devi Batish, started me off on percussion and sitar. My father, Pandit Shiv Dayal Batish, taught me classical North Indian music, first through singing and then through constant practising and performances.

How involved were you in your parents’ music career as a child?

I would always tag along when my father would travel to perform in concerts. It was normal for me to see large audiences react to his singing. The back-stage chaos, the back slapping and the bravos. Meeting leading artists and personalities from the Indian film and music industry. Having fans ask for autographs...

I was totally at home back stage. I was in love with all this even before I had officially started learning. It all gave me a deeper sense of belonging in the arts, and life within it seems to be the norm rather than the opposite.

You also took a different direction from other members of your family fusing pop, rock, funk and jazz. How challenging was this?

It all started with Western pop songs when I was about five. Bombay had so much Western music on the air waves that we tuned in routinely. My father also liked to listen to world music via his shortwave radio. Our house was bursting with music from Russia, the Middle-East and Romania.

As a child I loved The Beatles, Cliff Richard and the Bee Gees. My sister Meena and I would learn all their tunes and sing along. I picked up a cheap guitar, and would try learning the chords to all the songs I liked.

Where we lived in Bombay, our neighbours were Portuguese and they would have these amazing parties, where bands would come and play through the night.

Later, when I moved to the UK, I was surrounded with the Western music and culture. So I was immersed in it. My father played the sitar in several British-produced songs – most famously in the film that starred The Beatles themselves, Help.

‘It takes a lifetime to play the sitar’

How aware were you of all this?

Well, during this time I would answer the phone for my father and actually got to speak with George Harrison who would call our house to speak and share his sitar-related ideas with my father.

He would send his limo to bring my father to his mansion in Surrey, England, when my father was teaching his then wife Patti Boyd (who later married Eric Clapton).

I was deeply aware and influenced by all this. My attempt to bring it all together happened much later in US.

In Santa Cruz, around 1984, I felt an urge to create sitar music that would rock as hard as any Western instrumental.

I also wanted it to have universal appeal, so it would have a shot at getting some dance floor plays.

Also, at around this time I did several concerts with John Neptune on Shacuhachi flute, David Harnish on guitar, Zakir Hussain on tabla and myself on sitar. They were a blast and I caught the fusion bug.

How did the electronic part come into it all?

I remember spending almost $5,000 to buy a recording machine, synths, drum machines, music-writing software and an IBM computer.

This was all great, except I had no technical experience. So all these machines just sat there for a number of months.

I was distraught at having I talked myself into spending this mini fortune.

Then I started learning music notation, sequencing, drum programming, midi, recording machine setups, the wiring....

But bringing it all together was a nightmare and the music got lost. Then, one day, I finally emerged out of this hole. Magically, I had every single element ‘talking’ to everything else. My studio suddenly came alive.

I was so excited that I popped a tape on my recorder and just started playing the sitar as fast and loud as I could.

I had my sitar plugged into some effects pedals that made me sound huge. Echo, reverb, flanging, it was all just too overwhelming. I could suddenly see and feel a tingling to be creative. I was ready.

The track Sitar Mania is a classic case in point; it starts off in a very quiet and reflexive mood and then builds up with the help of more Indian instruments like the tabla... and then literally mushrooms into a splash of colour.

Ashwin Batish

What can you tell us about Sitar Mania?

Sitar Mania is the title song of my second set of Sitar Power songs. It was a creation that I whipped out after I had the indo-samba groove sequenced, tweaked and playing out of my studio speakers.

I purposely wanted the live feel to this album, since I had burnt myself out with the process of mixing my first one.

Being a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy comedy I took the liberty of fading the ending in a similar temperament as their theme music. If you listen carefully you will hear it.

It’s a full body, yogic workout to play this instrument

You are based in California, the bedrock of psychedelic music, which utilised the sitarconsiderably. How is sitar playing viewed now?

The sitar will always hold a special place in people’s hearts all across the world. Its very strum touches the soul.

When my record was being charted in the top ten at many NPR radio stations, I was receiving some very positive comments from the DJs.

One sticks out and perhaps best explains and answers the question best:

“We were born of parents from the 1960’s era. Your music has brought what we grew up listening to – the classical North Indian sitar and the progressive pop rock and jazz – together in one of the most expressive and explosive ways.”

I have held several classes for application of Indian music to Western pop, rock, jazz at universities such as San Jose State and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Recently, some of my music for Western Chamber orchestra has been performed with great success. It just reinforces the fact that music is music.

The nuances, timbres and cultural approaches set the genres apart, but the engine is the same. Cross cultural applications succeed if one keeps an open mind and allows the similarities to ferment and gel into one.

How much do you think Ravi Shankar helped revolutionise sitar playing in the west? Do you think Western experimental music would have been the same without the sitar?

Ravi Shankar and his elder brother Uday Shankar were the pioneering forces in bring-ing awareness to the sitar and Indian music.

He was the voice and face of sitar and remains so to many even today. He was also a very open- minded classical musician and his collaboration with Yahudi Menhuin, Andre Previn, Philip Glass and Zubin Mehta are well documented.

I believe it was his early experience as a dancer in his elder brother Uday Shankar’s troupe that laid a foundation in him to later experiment in orchestral and fusion works.

He learned the power of drama and applications of musical ragas and emotional themes to imagery.

This gave him a unique voice and a future direction to bring the sitar to the masses.

His music was thrilling, always sought to reach dramatic heights and in many instances his fusions and orchestral recording involved large musical collaborations.

I was blown away by one of his recordings with the Russian symphony.

I think the sound of the sitar is its biggest asset. It conjures up a very Indian vision in any fusion music context.

That is why it is probably the most utilised in such ventures. Other instruments have been used with success as in the Indian violin, the sarod, the flute etc. I love them all. But to the west, nothing says India just like a sitar.

There was, and still is, a trend to have Western instruments have sitar type drones and open tuning.

This is fine, but such applications hit a brick wall due to the intonation differences between the Eastern and the Western systems.

Clashes can be huge when the two instruments are played together. Awareness about this would help towards creating finer works.

How can one balance the technicalities and the artistic aspects of sitar playing?

First you need to master what I term the ‘technical acrobatics’ of playing this huge instrument, from sitting in a half lotus position to balancing it well so your hands can do the intricate job of playing.

This practice alone can eat up a few years. It’s a full body, yogic work out, to sit and play this instrument for more than five minutes.

Some of my classical concerts last for three hours. One has to learn to sit still, keep a smile on and then create something fantastic. So it is good to start early in life.

But despite all this, learning Indian music takes you to a completely other world.

My father would often say that to master Indian music one needs at least three life times. I think he was being kind. It is really an unending exploration. But that is also its allure.

Are there any particular rock songs featuring the sitar that you really like?

I actually kind of like children’s songs nowadays. As a father of four, I became the sitar voice for children’s music for a while. But, of course, one can never forget the Beatles’s classic Norwegian Wood.

Ashwin Batish performs with the Sitar Power Trio on Saturday at 10pm at the Argotti Gardens, Floriana.

www.maltafolkmusicfestival.org