Exclusive interview | Grammy winner Chandrika Tandon: ‘Vedic chants are a great gift available to us’

Chandrika Krishnamoorthy Tandon recently won a Grammy for her collaborative album Triveni under the category for the Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album.

Chandrika Krishnamoorthy Tandon recently won a Grammy for her collaborative album Triveni under the category for the Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album with Grammy-winning flautist Wouter Kellerman and cellist Eru Matsumotu. (Also Read: Grammys 2025: Indian-American Chandrika Tandon beats Ricky Kej and Anoushka Shankar to win award)

Chandrika Tandon won a Grammy this year, beating Ricky Kej and Anoushka Shankar. (Instagram)

“It’s a tremendous honour, a terrific platform, and it's brought much attention to my music and work. It's also been an incredible outpouring of love and support from so many people,” says Tandon about the Grammy win.

This marks the septuagenarian’s first Grammy win and second nomination, cementing her influence in spiritual and healing music. The deeply meditative musical album blends ancient mantras with the soothing sounds of flute and cello, bridging cultures and traditions.

“I don't really dictate where or how it should go. It takes its own course, and it creates its own dictates. I have a couple of other major projects underway,” says Tandon about her creative process.

Here’s an exclusive interview with her about her music, learnings and teachings:

How did the collaboration for Triveni happen?

For Triveni, the collaboration started with Eru Matsumotu, whose idea it was because she wanted to do something around sound and healing. That was her dream and vision. I didn't know Eru. She had reached out to Wouter. They knew each other. Wouter reached out to me because he knew of my music and liked my singing. I just wasn't sure what it was all about, but I liked the idea about healing and wellness. So I said I would explore the idea.

They started to put together sketches of some very simple Western tunes. And then we all met in New York for a few days. This was the first time we came together musically with a couple of other producers and engineers, and we brainstormed. While I heard all of these pieces, I started to imagine mantras being added on top of them. I imagined mantras, in particular keys and ragas, that I could use as fillers to create that sense of healing and well-being. So this just became a wonderful coming together, but not without its issues and challenges, because all three of us came from different traditions. We all have strong musical wills and all love to be heard. It was quite a journey of sharing and learning. We returned to our locations once we got the skeleton of the album together in New York. I live in New York, Wouter is in South Africa, and Eru is in California and we worked with the producer in Amsterdam. We all just worked with different people to do our parts within the agreed-upon skeleton. It was a collaborative process, a give-and-take.

What were some of the main challenges and artistic differences in the collaboration?

It's always a challenge when you come from a tradition of doing a lot of music a certain way to give space to other musicians to be heard. We had to create distinctive voices for the flute, a distinctive voice for the cello, and a distinctive vocal sound. All three needed their space to breathe, and we couldn't compete with each other, yet we had to feel like we cohabitated the same space in a harmonious way. That's not easy to accomplish, and it's harder when you're living in three different parts of the world because, with time zone differences, you're exchanging pieces of music, and sometimes things get lost in translation. We would have debates. They might look at something from a Western angle, and I was looking at it from the flow of the raga angle. They would say, this seems long, why don't we just cut it out? I’d say, No, you can't, because that would be half a mantra. You need to have the whole mantra. These kinds of debates we had, or I would feel some movement is too repetitive or boring and we'd say, look, let's not make it so linear. Let's collaborate more in certain parts, even if we overlap. The beauty of what we created is that the three voices and the three voices are sometimes in harmony, sometimes separately and sometimes overlapping.

We played with various mixes of that, which made it work. In some way, shape, or form, we got the right balance. We had different ideas of what we would have done differently, but we accomplished what we set out to do.

Can you tell me about the start of your musical journey?

I grew up in a very small, simple environment in Chennai, where music was everywhere. But then, I moved very deeply into the academic and business worlds. It was important for me to do well in school, so I went to IIM Ahmedabad.

Music was not really a centre stage in my life. I would listen, sing, and participate in many extracurricular activities, but it was just on the side.

In college, I would go to the DJ club and listen to the records endlessly. That's how my musical life was at business school.

When I was in my 20s, I barely saw the light of day at McKinsey. I worked 24/7, so I didn't have time to goof off doing anything else except concentrate on creating and delivering impact for clients. The music was on a Friday night. I would come home and listen to endless amounts of French songs.

When I joined McKinsey, I was given a signing bonus of $5,000 for a security deposit, rent, and furniture to settle in. I bought two things with that money—a stereo system for about $1800 and a Martin guitar for about $2500. One of the things I carried from India was a collection of records, so hearing my records on this extraordinarily beautiful stereo system was the greatest joy.

I had less than $500 left to eat, live, or do anything for a month. I ate boiled rice and coriander chutney. I slept on a sheet with a pillow on the hard floors, but I heard the best music, and I had a great guitar.

And then, fortunately, I got paid, and I could do more, but I never thought of it as a loss. I never thought of it as sacrificing anything. To me, the joy of owning a Martin was a lifelong dream. I took lessons, but the sound of just strumming it and playing the simplest EFG chords was such a joy. I didn't care about food, shelter, or any creature comforts. It was that I had clothes, my work and my music.

What about your classical music training?

When I was little, I took Carnatic music classes for a couple of years. My mother brought a teacher to the house, so we got classes every week. The teacher would come for an hour and teach us. It was not intense training in any way. He would teach us a bunch of songs.

In the meantime, my motherwas learning the Veena, and she would take classes with young children there. Music was around, and I learned to play the Veena while watching her. That was just my training in Carnatic music. Many years later, I went back a little bit more to Carnatic music with a very, very big master and then much more to Hindustani music. Later on, my training was much more in Hindustani music.

How do you find the current music scene?

I'm not really in the musical scene. I was just a listener of all kinds of music. All these musicians were like iconic, ethereal figures in the stratosphere who just came to you through the radio. You have heard about playback singers such as Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle and MS Subbulakshmi. This was the time before YouTube. We couldn't afford to buy concert tickets to go to anything.

I remember the time I heard Ms Subalakshmi sing at a music sabha that was very close to my house. During the music season in December, they would put up a big thatch roof.

I liked the second half of the concert because, in the first half, they would do all these big ragas and everything. Still, in the second half of the concert, MS Subbulakshmi would sing Meera bhajans and songs, the only thing I liked to listen to.

It's ironic to think that, at one stage, I was standing on the street peering through a palm frond at the singers, and now I get to actually be performing on stage. I never imagined it, and I never thought about my life that way because the music was not centre stage, and even when it became centre stage, my music was not for performing. My music was not intended to create albums. My music was for me initially, and then I started to create an album, which grew from there. But that's even now. I love music because it makes me happy, and I love sharing it when it makes others happy.

Have you passed on your musical legacy?

I have one daughter who's an incredible musician. She's a singer and a brilliant pianist, though she's not pursued a life of music. She’s very talented, has learnt the piano for many years, and created a lot of music for her A Cappella group when she was in college. She has children now and sings to them.

To me, the most beautiful part of this journey—and I hope it will accelerate a lot—is that many young people have come to me to understand what these chants mean.

I remember my four-year-old grandchild asking me, Ammu, what the light is. How do I know I have the light? When I did Ammu’s Treasures (the previous album, on which I also included these chants in a different format), I think these are questions everybody should be asking and thinking about the answers for themselves.

Do you have any messages to give to budding musicians?

One of my teachers said that learning, practising and internalizing music has three stages. One is when you're actively practising- when you're sitting there and singing and doing the scales and the riyaz and the practising of the song and the actual physical singing. The other is the listening part because listening is also a way of learning, and the third part, which is very counterintuitive, is silence because the way you grow in music is not a linear curve. You have breaks and plateaus. You learn something and then there's a break. The mind and the cells need time to adjust and absorb as you reach the next level.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

One of the reasons and one of the beautiful outcomes of what's happened with Triveni and the moment we are in now is that in all different segments of our population, whether in India, US, or any part of the world, particularly with our youth, mental anxiety and stress has become much more center stage. It's less stigmatized to talk about it and to own it.

Wellness and well-being are important topics. What I have been doing for the last several years through mantras, using these ancient Vedic sounds, which have deep resonances and impacts that are way beyond our comprehension, is critically important today.

My teachers have always said whenever I've asked them: Don't take my word for it; go and experience it yourself.

Our gurus have worked very hard to teach us about the Vedic sounds. Chants are a very easy way to access them. This wealth of ancient wisdom is there for the asking, for the taking, and in this day and age, it's a great gift that's available to us.