At a time when a desi male singer is in the news for all the wrong reasons, it’s good to remember that there’s such a thing as the art of the song, and nice to come across a desi brother who is honing his craft like a devoted apprentice: slowly, steadily, and with growing success.
Sachal Vasandani, 28, has been singing on the New York jazz circuit for a few years now: he’s performed with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Wynton Marsalis, and he has a regular early-evening gig at Zinc Bar in Greenwich Village. That’s where Manish heard him almost two years ago now, which resulted in this post; and the fact that it’s taken this long for Sachal to drop his first album, which comes out tomorrow, and that the disc features the same core trio (David Wong on bass, Quincy Davis on drums, and Jeb Patton on piano) that Manish heard that night, tells you a lot about the consistency and hard work and constant plugging away that it takes to develop your sound and make your move in the real music world, as opposed to freakshows like American Idol.
The album is called “Eyes Wide Open” and is out on Detroit label Mack Avenue. It’s really an album of songs, by which I mean, songs with lyrics, verses and refrains, melody and exposition — this is not free jazz, in fact it’s not even what most listeners would consider edgy, and that centrist disposition makes it eminently accessible, perhaps more so than some heads would be willing to cop to liking. Three of the compositions are Vasandani’s own; the remainder divide among standards and covers from sources as diverse as Sade and Iron & Wine.
I sat down with the brother recently for a story that you can find here. It will give you the rundown on his life story and all the usual profile elements. Here’s a little excerpt that will give you an idea of his approach and sensibility:
With his first album coming out, Vasandani is in the happy space of enjoying the ride. He bridles, understandably, at the limitations implicit in the “crooner” label with which he is getting tagged, but he says there is plenty of time ahead for him to work in a more abstract or edgy vein.
For now, Vasandani says, his chief concern is to properly serve the song form — to “respect the lyric,” as he puts it several times. Whether it’s his own composition or someone else’s, from the Great American Songbook or a more remote source, matters less to him than the discipline and honesty of delivery.
“You just have to find great songs,” he says. “If they happen to come from your body, great. If they happen to come from keeping your ears open on the street, or listening to records, that’s great, too. ….. As long as I can put them over with honesty, and make first and foremost myself, but ultimately an audience, believe in what I’m saying, then it’ll be relevant, it’ll be poignant, and it’ll be believable. And it’s almost irrelevant whether it came from my pen or somebody else’s.”
It didn’t really make it into my story but of course we took some time to discuss the Desi Angle (TM) as well. I imagine a lot of you will recognize yourselves in aspects of Sachal’s experience; he grew up in an exurb of Chicago, in a desi family that was pretty much not involved in the whole desi cultural hothouse scene, and the key desi influences he credits in his upbringing are his dad’s music collection, which joined jazz and Indian classical music, and the family trips back to India. It was only later, at the University of Michigan and then in New York, that he began to key into an American desi cultural milieu, and you can tell from chatting with him that he considers himself a bit of an outsider to it, though without dismissal or rancor. At the same time, he’s very much aware that second-generation Asian Americans, and desis in particular, are making moves in the creative music scene today, enriching it with the influences of the different traditions and hybrid forms that they carry, in sometimes explicit and sometimes more diffuse ways.
I came away very impressed, not only by the brother’s work but by the craftsman’s thoughtfulness he brings to it, a certain humility and also evidence of accumulating scholarship in the history of American song. Another thing: he’s fine. As a female management rep sitting in on the interview was all too happy to share with me, he has quite the fan base among women, and no wonder — he’s tall and handsome with a winning combination of Midwestern directness and hints of a more complicated inner life. And, like, he can sing.
Sachal Vasandani plays this month across the country: this Wednesday he’s at Scullers in Boston, and he continues to New York, Chicago, Seattle, Oakland and Philadelphia. The schedule is here.
