What are you listening to? 
Aaron Parks’ Invisible Cinema. I am intrigued by his arrangements and melodic structures.

Your all-time favourite albums? 
Signature Series Vol 4 by Ali Akbar Khan & Pandit Nikhil Banerjee – it’s the pinnacle of raga. Pat Metheny’s Still Life (Talking) is another favourite, a supreme example of improvisational music meeting intelligent production and arrangements. 

Musician you most admire?
Four all-time greats: Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Zakir Hussain and Chick Corea. 

Memorable musical encounter? 
Collaborating with Béla Fleck and Zakir Hussain on my album Unbounded, and playing with Pat Metheny in his home in New York City and watching his The Orchestrion Project in development. 

First album you ever bought? 
In my teenage years I bought a cassette of A Handful of Beauty by Shakti with John McLaughlin, and then sometime later Hazir by Hariharan and Ustad Zakir Hussain. 

What’s your hidden talent?
I’m a tech geek who loves working on gadgets to figure out how they work, always taking them apart and putting them back together. 

If you weren’t a musician, what would you be? 
Perhaps a lawyer.

Read the review of Purbayan Chatterjee & Rakesh Chaurasia’s Saath Saath

This interview originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today