ACCOMPANYING ESSAY: "A CERTAIN RESTLESSNESS TOOK HOLD OF ME........"

It was a brisk, sunny day in early March 2020. I walked out of my producer’s basement studio, and he said, “I think we may have captured a final vocal today!” I responded, “I think you’re right!” We stood there for a moment, grinning at each other. Years of work was finally coming to closure.

The “final vocal” to which we referred was one of the ten original songs on my then in-progress cd, INNOCENT MONSTER, my first studio recording since 2013 and first all-originals project ever. But both of us soon forgot which track we’d meant. The coronavirus shutdown began a few days later and the project—upon which I’d pinned so many long delayed ambitions—went into an indefinite hiatus.

~~~

As COVID-19 first-order tragedies and secondary or tertiary impacts go, this one obviously doesn’t rank. Nobody died, nobody suffered, nobody lost their life or livelihood or loved one. Still, I went into six weeks of private mourning. I had so much riding on the completion of this album. Some of the songs were over 10 years old. Others had been written within the past 12 months. They represented the absolute best of the best work I’d ever done, as a self-taught composer, as a pianist and singer, and as a lyricist with a literary bent but an ability and desire to humble herself to solid rock/pop songwriting practices.

After instigating and orchestrating MOBTOWN MOON, a huge Pink Floyd homage project in 2011-2013—with the help of singer-songwriter Ellen Cherry as my co-producer and over 40 local musicians and visual artists—I was anxious to get back to my own material, my 100% original vision. But I was also burnt out. I spent the better part of year unable to even listen to music. For a long while I’d had trouble gathering the time and focus—my son was still making his way through middle and high school—as well as a lack of funding, a need to take on various day jobs, and a certain dearth of emotional support from my husband.

Finding Pete Strobl as my new vocal coach, later my record producer, in 2017 had been a timely miracle. With Pete’s help, I worked my butt off for two solid years on a fresh, athletically wise approach to singing, and finally became the kind of vocalist I’d always suspected I might be. I just hadn’t known what kind of work to do, until Pete showed me. Then my own relentless work ethic kicked in. At the same time, I was inspired to dust off a bunch of old unrecorded songs and write several new ones, and they were all pointing in a new-for-me art or alt rock direction, still driven by a jazz sensibility, but harder, darker, edgier. It was Pete who put together a basic band consisting of a heavy metal drummer, rock guitarists, and a host of other musicians that I entrained into my clarified vision. INNOCENT MONSTER was going to be the most *100% me* project of anything I’d ever accomplished. Everything was finally coming together: my songs, my band, my artistic identity, even my new branding/marketing approach as “Sandhya,” an ancient Sanskrit word meaning the juncture of light and dark, and also my actual first name.

It fit the material so well: rockin’ tunes with lyrics that constantly hinting at or outright demonstrating a dark, cynical, philosophical, and sometimes even depressive view of the world. I’m a pretty joyful, amiable, and fun person, despite being a profound historical and political pessimist with little hope for humanity’s survival. The WTMD deejay Sam Sessa had made note of my musical duality way back in 2007 with my first released record, MEMOIR, but it had taken me more than 12 years to fully  own and embody it. Sandhya, an innocent monster, operating at the juncture of light and dark.

We had recorded the basic rhythm section tracks with me on keyboard in November 2019 at Stages Music Arts studio, and had spent the late fall and early winter doing overdubs with background vocalists, additional rhythm and lead guitarists, a B3 organist, a fiddler player, a percussionist, a French horn player, an accordionist…every sound we wanted, except for the vocals.

I was practicing them all the time, of course. The ten songs had undergone rigorous examination and reconsideration over nearly 3 years. I’d spent up to five hours a week with Pete just singing and singing and singing some more.

Never before had I allowed anyone as much power over and access to my process, but the results spoke for themselves. My range increased, my resonance increased, my confidence started going through the roof. Interestingly, the stronger I got as a vocalist, the clearer I also became as a self-accompanying piano player. No longer was I satisfied with being a good-enough singer who played good-enough piano. I was finally being held to account at the highest standards. (Pete had come out of the big label music industry of Los Angeles in the 70s-80s-90s, so his high bar became my high bar.)

To have this momentum suddenly stopped by the global pandemic was, as I say, nothing in the way of a tragedy. But it did crush me for a little while.

~~~

Then, after six weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I had to make things happen. I researched mics and bought an SM7B, an excellent workhorse studio/performance microphone most famously known as the one Quincy Jones made Michael Jackson use on THRILLER. I downloaded the digital audio workstation software called Reaper and began watching video tutorials. I turned myself into my own audio engineer, gathering advice from both Pete and my rhythm guitarist Scott Smith, a wonderful Baltimore-based producer himself, who had engineered the MOBTOWN MOON cd. Every day in July and half of August, I recorded myself singing. I’d spend all day on one song, sing it dozens of times, cut the best parts out of all those different takes to create a “comp” or composite track. Pete would listen to it and give me notes for improvement. At some point, I barely needed Pete anymore: I could hear what I wanted to do better or differently, and then just make the fix or the change myself. My ear got so persnickety I could hear when I was out of tune by mere “cents” flat or sharp. I was singing 8-10 hours every day, breaking only to cook for my family and eat a little something myself, and never struggling with vocal fatigue. I probably sang each song a couple hundred times over those 6-7 weeks. In the end, I was good enough to sing each track in one take with maybe just a few quick overdubbed fixes in a measure here or there.

It is hard to explain what happened next, other than to say this experience was so deeply empowering that it led to my decision to divorce my husband.

In part this was due to longstanding conflicts and a general growing-apart. We were 27 years old when we met and became inseparable. Now at 54, we’d spent half our lives together. But it was time for me to surrender to my most daring and relentless dreams. Living the musician’s life in full, putting creative visions front and center in my life. Our son would soon be off to college. I’d soon have a new record out, despite the pandemic, and it would be the first work of mine that truly hit national or international standards in terms of production quality and overall execution.

I was ready to do what artists have to do to achieve their absolute highest work. Live on my own, as frugally as possible, with only a grand piano as my roommate/best friend.

I’d dreamed of becoming a rock diva as a child, as so many do. Now I am ready to aim straight for it. Even if it takes me until age 60.

The time is now.   

Recent efforts in my ongoing attempt to (artfully & respectfully) mess around with other people's compositions, and marshal them to my own storytelling impulses! 

1) Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) -- The Eurythmics
2) Angel From Montgomery -- John Prine 
3) Green Plastic Trees -- Radiohead
4) Shake Yourself Loose -- T Bone Burnett
5) Nothing Compares 2 U -- Prince (recorded by Sinead O'Connor)
6) Breathe -- Pink Floyd
7) Round Midnight -- Thelonious Monk
8) Wild Horses -- Rolling Stones
9) Wild Is The Wind -- jazz standard covered by David Bowie
10) Hurt -- Nine Inch Nails

These are imperfect videos by design....I premiered them in my Facebook private fan group page as "live streaming rehearsals," or precorded videos, but not final product in any sense. 

I keep cranking them out as quickly as I can. You'll notice I never use sheet music. One of my goals for the current year was to have at least an hour of music fully memorized and at the ready. I ended up with closer to two hours. I'm willing myself to become one of those people who sits down and "magically" seems to know every song ever written. 

I've long been offering brief essays as a part of my twice-monthly music newsletter. As time went on, the essays began to stand out as the main reason people bothered to open the emails in the first place, even if they contained tons of other news about my musical endeavors. So I've recently begun cross-posting those pieces on Substack, allowing them to get longer and meatier. Right off the bat, without any marketing, I received about 10 free subscribers and 4 paid ones. Now I'm locked in! Aiming to start putting material out there EVERY Tuesday in 2021. Doesn't always have to be a fresh new essay. I intend on recycling some of my interesting old published material, offering up picture essays, doing brief podcast commentaries, whatever strikes my fancy. 

But at heart, this is a fundamentally literary endeavor because no matter how much time I spend in music, I still need to honor my first love, writing. 

IN PROGRESS PROJECT

The lyrics always have to come first for me--I'm still fundamentally a storyteller--but the rhythmic and harmonic ideas usually come simultaneously or almost so. It's a matter of hammering them out on piano and making decisions...and then sometimes changing or complicating or simplyfying those decisions once I pull a band together and start rehearsing/recording.

Here are two performances of songs more or less finished.  The notebook pictured  more whole lyrics or beginnings of songs I generated during the early part of the pandemic. In many cases I scribbled them somewhere else, then typed/printed them out and then pasted them in place so I can revise and add more words, as well as start to sketch out chord progression ideas.

These are the songs I want to include on SLEEP, my next full-length cd....some are completely written, others still in scraps. Hope to make that happen in 2022-2023.:

1) Sleep (2021 version, original was on my first CD) 2) All Night Bandstand 3) The Surrender 4) Don't Cling (older, never recorded) 5) Rigged Game (older, never recorded) 6) Tell Me Something 7) Quixote's Mistake 8) Friday Night with the Elephant Man (2021 version, original was on my first CD) 9) Universal Expat 10) Feast of Love

COMPLETED PROJECT

For the NYC-based novelist, playwright, and filmmaker John Reed, I composed and played a piano score on his quirky character study called Theo and John Talk Nonsense, starring character actor Theodore Bouloukis. The film was created from outtakes of three of John's previous projects in which the actor had appeared.  Between takes, in conversation or just riffing on his life, Theo proved to be a charmer, often confident and self-aware, occasionally anxious and self-involved. He's a guy many of us artists can relate to.

I was proud and excited to be a part of this project. John requested something in the way of "ragtime" or "oldey-timey jazz." I suggested that those types of motifs should be counterbalanced with more modern sounds, so as not to sonically ridicule Theo in any way. There are subtly funny moments throughout the film but I didn't think we wanted to underscore the humor with music that sounded like a circus.

I first came up with a set of short melodic/harmonic themes to fit various parts of the film. (See the Soundcloud playlist for the "rough drafts" I demo'd on my home piano.) The goal was to prepare this basic material and some preliminary time cues in advance, but to otherwise to improvise my way through the film scene by scene. (I did a lot of 'shedding in the key of Db to get that lefthand stride bass-line up to tempo.) We did the shoot/audio capture in a lovely studio room at Opera America in midtown Manhattan. I'd had trouble sleeping the night before--two mewling cats at my friend's apartment proved unhelpful--but some coffee and donuts helped with that. In general my piano work that day was solid, or at least imperfect in just the right ways. John later made a few timing adjustments in edit, but for the most part this was my live, in-the-moment response to Theo's off-the-cuff commentary. A fun day and a fascinating project.

COMPLETED PROJECT

“Wildly eclectic, yet consistently absorbing.” ... Baltimore City Paper

Mobtown Moon studio CD (released May 2013) is a new interpretation of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon album, co-produced by me and ellen cherry with the participation of 40 outstanding Baltimore-based musicians in rock, jazz, classical, hip-hop and other styles of music.

Our genre-defying version of this classic album highlights the lyrical and melodic beauty of the original, by taking the songs out of their stadium-rock context and reconsidering them from a grown-up, singer-focused perspective. Baltimore CityPaper called it "wildly eclectic yet consistently absorbing," while both CityPaper and Baltimore Magazine awarded it their respective "Best of Baltimore" honors. The CD has received coverage in many music blogs and we’ve been interviewed by several Internet and terrestrial radio stations around the nation. So far, we have been overwhelmed and grateful for the positive response to our venture.

We're especially proud that we were able to create a beautiful, unique, meaningful music product showcasing the tremendous talents of our friends and colleagues here in Charm City. Already, this project has spawned all sorts of new partnerships and creative ideas.

ORIGIN

I conceived the project in 2009 while listening to the original Floyd recording, which remains very moving and relevant four decades after its release. 2009 was a dark time in the country: we were reeling from the aftershocks of a global market meltdown and the beginning of an endless recession; we were still at war, still paranoid, still so at odds with each other politically, still in denial about things like growing income inequality and potentially catastrophic global climate change.

Personally, I was feeling the weight of unhappy current events, and also suffering my own private confusions. Listening at this time to Dark Side was a source of comfort and connection. It reminded me that every era of human history has been dark, has been filled with war and want, one way or another.

MUSICAL MISSION

As a jazz person, my inclination was to take this beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes angry music and respond to it with meaning, in the same way that master jazz composers responded to Tin Pan Alley favorites or great European classical composers responded to the folk songs of their childhood: by revisiting, reinterpreting, and reinventing.

What I also wanted to do was avoid the traditional “tribute” album that simply recreates the original songs in the same form but with different players. There are already way too many Pink Floyd cover bands in existence and I have no interest in that kind of shallow mimicry.

I had a demonstrated knack for making interesting arrangements, but this kind of project was significantly more ambitious and potentially tricky. After all, many millions of people love the original album, which is still a perennial bestseller. To "mess" with these beloved songs was to take some amount of personal and professional risk, for sure--especially because it represented a fairly great leap compared with my earlier work.

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT

In 2010 I spoke about the project with my friend, award-winning singer-songwriter ellen cherry, who immediately loved the idea and met it with a vision of her own: to make a true Baltimore collaboration that demonstrated the depth and breadth of musical talent we have in this town. We created a partnership to make this dual vision happen, and then set to work: making two demo song recordings, fundraising through individual donors and grantmakers, partnering with local nonprofit collaborators (especially the Hearing and Speech Agency and MammoJam), developing a production and promotional timeline (we were determined to release the record in spring 2013, close to the 40th anniversary of the original recording’s release), recruiting and scheduling many busy musicians (which occasionally felt like herding cats), and doing all the executive work required to put together such a massive collaboration.

As the chief arranger, I was directly responsible for the arrangement/instrumentation/sonic details of 10 of our 12 tracks, and indirectly for 2 more done in collaboration with the instrumentalists who played on them. (ellen took over the arranging for one track entirely, and she is also fully responsible for art-directing our beautiful album cover and for our entire project “look.”)

MUSICIANS ON THE ALBUM

Andrew Grimm (banjo)
Ben Frock (trumpet)
Brian Gundersdorf (vocals)
Brian Simms (piano, organ, accordion, vocals)
Bryan Young (bassoon)
Christian Stengle (drums)
Craig Alston (saxophone)
Cris Jacobs (vocals, guitar)
Dave Hadley (pedal steel)
David Ross (spoken word)
ellen cherry (vocals, cello, synths)
Eric Kennedy (drums)
Femi the DriFish (spoken word)
Frank Russo (drums)
Jake Leckie (bass)
Jeff Reed (bass)
Jen Smith (cello)
John Thomakos (drums)
Kate Zahradnik (viola)
Katie Graybeal (vocals)
Lea Gilmore (vocals)
Matt Everhart (bass)
Mike Gambone (drums)
Nick Currie (violin)
OrchKids choir (10 students with director Dion Cunningham)
Patrick Klink (vocals)
Russsell Kirk (saxophone)
Sandy Asirvatham (vocals, piano, synth keyboards)
Tim Anderson (cello)
Todd Marcus (clarinet)
Scott Smith (guitars, percussion, recording engineer)
Vincent Stringer (vocals)
Warren Boes (guitar)

CD RELEASE PARTY

We were thrilled to present our premiere performance of MOBTOWN MOON at the Kraushaar Auditorium in front of more than 800 fans. We had an incredible cast--not everyone from the album, but close. Thirty of Baltimore's finest musicians in rock, jazz, classical, hip-hop, gospel, bluegrass, and opera/choral music were crowded on that stage together, making music and listening to each other as the audience of 700+ watched in wonderment. By the time the Baltimore Choral Arts Society came on for the last two songs, there were 50 of us on that stage. The communal feeling of the event was palpable. People cried at some of their favorite old Pink Floyd songs, reinterpreted here and presented by some of their favorite local artists. It was a thrilling and moving evening for all of us.

ellen has been in many big shows, but this was a personal milestone for her in terms of the size, ambition, and authority she had over the performance details. I handled pre-show stuff like press and finances. By the time we started actually playing music, most of our hardest work was well behind us, and while we had some musical duties, we also had the opportunity to relax a bit and enjoy our incredible musical friends doing their thing.

I would have to rank 9/28/13 as one of the best days of my life, along with marrying my husband and adopting our son.

Getting to sing my version of "The Great Gig In the Sky" was also simply a 30-year dream-come-true.

But really the most satisfying thing was this: After the show, so many of our stellar musicians--Jen and Scott Smith of Naked Blue, Jonathan Gilmore, Brian Simms, Warren Boes, Andrew Grimm and Dave Hadley of June Star, Dave and Femi of the 5th L, Jake Leckie--so many of these fine and highly experienced performers said to us:

"That was one of the best shows I've ever been in, in my life."

AND:

"When can we do it again?"

That was the REAL dream come true: the joy and respect of peers.

"Sheath" is one of the only short stories I've ever completed (I'm built for long work!). It was published in the Berkeley Fiction Review in 2000. The other pieces are more along the lines of personal essays, originally published under the column banner "Underwhelmed" at Baltimore CityPaper. In some ways, all this early work together can be taken as precursors to/practice for my finished memoir, PLAY IT BY EAR.

COMPLETED PROJECT

Kevin Robinson is a composer, bandleader, and reeds player who specializes in collective improvisations based on very minimal preplanned or composed material (sometimes called "free jazz"). He's a Baltimore native and I was lucky to play and record with him for a few years before he made a permanent move to California to study with Wadada Leo Smith and further his spiritual/musical explorations. The members of his band KREation could fluctuate from gig to gig, but his players were always phenomenal listeners and great on-the-fly compositional thinkers. A kind of throwback beatnick scene all around. It was probably the most fun I had in an ensemble ever, even better than playing my own compositions with my band. We almost never got paid but I'd follow Kevin almost anywhere to get a chance to be a part of his group again. (And I don't enjoy following anybody ever, so....)

Here's a disc of some of our spontaneously created recordings. This includes some of the best (craziest, loosest, freest) piano work I've done.

By the way, this is wholly Kevin Robinson's project on which I participated--don't let the Soundcloud verbiage "by Sandy Asirvatham" distract you. It happens because I've loaded the CD to my site.

Please also see the chapter of PLAY IT BY EAR entitled "Conversation With The Trees" all about my collaboraitons with Kevin Robinson.

Personnel:
Kevin Robinson, woodwinds & bandleader
Sandy Asirvatham, piano, keyboard, & vocals
Vattel Cherry, bass
Chris Taylor, electric guitar & percussion
Nathan Epstein, drums
Jeff Swiss, spoken word

COMPLETED PROJECT

MEMOIR (2007) Debut CD of almost all original songs. Jazz with eclectic influence. Honored as a Best Jazz Debut in The Village Voice by jazz critic/historian W. Royal Stokes. This disc contains 9 originals that were essentially the very first songs I'd ever written. I suppose there was a certain chutzpah involved in making this project....and yet I stand by these fledgling efforts, even more than a decade later, when I could probably arrange and execute them much more skillfully. The Downbeat-poll-winning bari sax player Claire Daley said this sounded like music that I simply had to create. It certainly felt that way to me at the time.

NOVEL SUMMARY FOR
A TYRANT FALLS IN LOVE

The story is a vivid, detailed dream in my mind, but I've only just begun to sketch the characters, structure the plot, do helpful reading/research, and write a few test pages. Given how busy I am with smaller intermittent projects and obligations, I suspect this epic-length concept may take me 10 years to draft in full. 

I used to be a journalist, i.e., a purely deadline-driven writer. In 2017-2018 I finally taught myself the practice of sitting at your desk for several hours every day, without fail, in order to let the world of the book envelop and contain you...even if nobody is waiting for it on any particular date. But only by this total immersion was I able to let my best and most cohesive work emerge. Having finished a memoir--autobiographical, yes, but built scene by scene, with a real narrative engine driving it--I'm now getting flooded again with the same kinds of big, bold novel ideas that descended on me regularly in my (far less productive) youth. At this point, time and distraction are my only enemies. 

A TYRANT FALLS IN LOVE will be a mock-epic, fake-historical novel inspired, indirectly, by the shock of Donald Trump's ascendance to the presidency in 2016. (Some of its roots, however, are much older than that and grounded in a certain sensitivity I've always had to issues of wealth and power--see "Blue Traveler," the 1998 piece I've also attached here.) Like so many Americans, I have been appalled and chastened to watch a classic authoritarian peresonality rise to power here. Trump is new on the local scene, yet by global standards, he is a walking cliche. The narcissism, corruption, and comical self-glorification are straight out of the dictator playbook. Even his quasi-incestuous relationship with his daughter echoes ancient and premodern imperial history.  I see A TYRANT FALLS IN LOVE as a tragicomic fable about human behavior: the perpetual dialectic between power-sharing and tyranny, freedom and repression, love and hatred, peace and war, selflessness and greed. The omniscient narrator will indulge in occasional anachronisms for humorous effect and to create a certain mythic resonance.


UNFINISHED SCREENPLAY TREATMENT FOR
ACCIDENTAL TRIO

ACCIDENTAL TRIO (indie drama) In late 1970s New York, a cult-figure punk rocker—the estranged daughter of a famous civil rights attorney—learns of his unexpected death and abruptly quits the music scene in grief. Slowly she finds solace in music again, via the beautiful upright bass she has inherited from him. She’s helped by a mysteriously accomplished old woman pianist next door and a trumpet player who’s been stalking her.