My first musical forays were unsuccessful.  When I was four of five years old my mother bought this really old piano – a player-piano that had been converted to an upright.  I took lessons for a year when I was six.  I learned to play “Hot Cross Buns”, and “When the Saints Come Marching In”.  But I was learning very slowly, and my teacher, Emily, frequently complained to my mother that I wasn’t taking the lessons seriously, wasn’t practicing enough, and joked around too much.  After weeks of lessons I can remember Emily, exasperated, pointing to a spot on the page and asking me, “Sanju, what note is that?”  I told her, matter-of-factly, that it was ‘C’.  I was correct, and Emily said something like, “very good!”  I went on to explain that I knew the note was ‘C’ because it was “hollow in the middle.”  Herein lied the problem: I had not yet figured out how to read music.  Shortly after that incident, Emily and my mother both agreed that I was too immature and impatient to continue receiving piano lessons.

From fourth grade on, Teaneck’s public school system offers free music lessons for most concert band instruments.  I wanted to play alto saxophone, as did many nine-year-old boys in my school, and that’s why the music teachers at that time required prospective saxophonists to play clarinet first, in hopes of attracting more attention to the less popular instrument.  So I played classical clarinet for nine years.  I didn’t show much promise at first.  There were four kids in my lesson group, and I think the consensus was that I was the second worst.  I can remember that my teacher didn’t seem to think I showed much promise, but my mother either didn’t care or didn’t believe him.  She asked around for the best clarinet teacher in town, and was given the number of Joseph Livelli.  She arranged for me to receive private lessons from him.

I can’t stress enough how important this man was in my musical development.  At this point in my life I was beginning to have doubts about the clarinet, whether it was actually a cool instrument.  The first time I heard this man play, he blew me away.  He truly made the instrument sing.  He studied at Julliard and played for the West Point marching band.  Why he was teaching clarinet in a small public school system like Teaneck’s, giving private lessons in his basement for twenty bucks a session, I’ll never know.  But regardless, Mr. Livelli slowly and methodically set about teaching me his craft.  It’s important to note that he didn’t treat me like I was amazing, and he didn’t treat me like I wasn’t good enough.  He held me to my own standard.  I practiced every day that summer and plowed through something like four lesson books.  So as it turned out, I set my own standard very high.  And while I was clearly better than all of his other students and playing at an advanced level for my age, he knew exactly what I was capable of.  And he was the first person to tell me that I had “good ears.”  It would be years before I understood what he meant.

Fast-forward six or seven years.  I was a troubled kid, troubled in many ways, but musically troubled especially.  I only owned two albums that I liked: The Fugees’ The Score and The House of Pain album that had “Jump Around” on it.  I didn’t like most of what I heard on the radio; I didn’t like most of what my friends listened to; and when I did hear something I liked I never knew what it was.  Then Napster came along, and I suddenly had a library of music that represented my taste.  I dug a little deeper on the internet and found Pitchfork.  And this is when I entered the second phase of my musical education.  I was still playing clarinet.  I showed up for my lessons and played in the school bands, but hardly ever practiced.  Classical music inherently bothered me, but I was too young to realize that classical music was the problem – not just playing clarinet as a whole.  There was nobody around who understood my problem.  There were plenty of people who told me I would regret quitting, but nobody who could explain to me, or even knew, why I would regret it.  So I quit when I was eighteen, at the end of my senior year of high school.  And I think I really let Mr. Livelli down.  He had very high expectations for me.

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That old piano still sits in my dining room.  Even after that failed attempt with Emily, I messed around on it as a kid, learning to play “Heart and Soul”, plunking out the melody to “Pachelbel’s Canon”, and also that techno theme song to the Mortal Kombat movie.  Slowly, so slowly that I can’t remember how old I was and where to draw the line, it became more than just playing around.  I do, however, remember the first step.

Playing the clarinet I’d always wondered how pianists were able to do two different things with their hands simultaneously.  In particular, I remember I’d seen people play “Heart and Soul” with both hands.  Like I said, this was a song I knew how to play, but I couldn’t play both parts at the same time.  So this seemed like a good place to start.  I simplified the bass line down to half-notes (instead of eighth-notes) and after a bit of practice was able to play the right-hand’s melody over it.  Eventually I began improvising over that chord progression.

The second step came when a high school friend burned me a copy of FruityLoops, right at the height of my discomfort with classical music, and the beginning of my fascination with pop music.  I was listening to a lot of hip hop, in particular.  Beatmaking seemed to be the answer to my musical frustration.  But my beatmaking process was counterintuitive.  I would bang out chord progressions on the piano, then plug them into the piano-roll in FruityLoops, figure out a melody on the piano, and plug it into FruityLoops.  It would be a few years before I figured out that I should be recording and editing performances on the piano, or some kind of keyboard instrument, and looping them.  All of that aside, figuring out all of those ideas on the piano slowly but surely gave me greater technical facility with the instrument.

*      *      *      *

I can remember the first time I jammed with other people.  I remember this giving me confidence in my ability on the instrument.  While I was never going to be the most technically gifted pianist, my ears were pretty well developed from all of those years of classical music.  When I got to Hampshire College I played music with more people, and my confidence continued to grow.  I took a very basic jazz performance and theory class my freshman year, and this pointed me in the right direction.  I was seeking a greater understanding of the nature of music, how it all worked.  I took theory, composition, and computer music classes throughout Hampshire, and somewhere along the way my inner songwriting abilities began to emerge.

I believe I have an understanding of most Western music, be it musique-concrete, blues, early jazz on through to the more free forms, funk, hip hop, four part harmony, modern classical music – whatever.  Thoroughly understanding all of these forms is not necessary, but it is very important to realize the full breadth of the spectrum because this is what makes it possible to realize how insignificant, how thoroughly and inherently un-groundbreaking, your own contribution really is.  And I’m not just speaking about music at this point…  This thought process is liberating and encourages you to explore freely without thinking that every step you take is profound.  I realize now that my earlier music suffered from this precise lack of understanding.

Hampshire College kind of flipped my worldview upside down, now that I think about it.  You have to understand:  I grew up in a small suburban town in New Jersey during the Clinton years to a Roman Catholic father and a bookworm of a mother.  I watched Disney movies and network television sitcoms as a kid.  I listened to Hot 97, and occasionally KROQ.  MTV was rampant.  Then came high school:  I read The Catcher in the Rye my junior year and was inspired, thought I was going to be a writer.  I studied filmmaking in high school and at the New York Film Academy, and thought I wanted to make narrative films.  In short, I’d been fed a narrow vision of America.  Two years later at Hampshire I was getting stoned multiple times a day, taking a course on American Capitalism, tripping hard on mushrooms, studying experimental nonfiction film, revisiting the idea of Catholicism through a class that looked at the Bible as a work of literature…  and on and on.

The biggest lesson I learned at Hampshire is the idea that as an artist you should dive into your medium and study it and practice it until you find little, tiny, seemingly insignificant things that interest you.  And then sit with these things.  Develop and nurture them, riff on them, until they form blocks upon which you can build.  They are the foundation of your art.

I believe I’ve built my foundation.

*      *      *      *

And now, in regards to this album:  This is far from my first recorded material.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m nothing like those Eoin brothers; I’m not sitting on a huge vault of rejected material.  I do write music constantly, however, I rarely take the time to record things.  Since the beginning of college, I’ve recorded a couple tracks a year.  Each time that I sat down to record, it seemed like my style had changed.  In the last couple years it’s seemed like that development has slowed down, like I’ve arrived at a place that I’m going to stay and explore for a while.  The first material from this state of mind is the music I created for my thesis film back in the winter of ‘09 (which will be up and available shortly).  How Does It Feel is the second exploration of this territory.  While I do feel that there is much room for improvement, of all the music I’ve made, this is easily the body of music that best represents what I’m about.

—October 2010