Guitar Prasanna On Teaching Music: “It’s Just File-Sharing”

Over a career spanning three decades, Prasanna Ramaswamy – known in the music world as Guitar Prasanna – has pushed the boundaries of guitar music. After growing up on a healthy diet of rock, pop, and Indian film music, he studied Carnatic music in India before moving to Boston to study jazz and composition at the Berklee School of Music.

Apart from his virtuosic guitar playing style, Prasanna’s catalog also reveals his ability to experiment with diverse genres and weave them together in compositions that are dense with musical ideas.

In the run-up to an all-day event in San Jose’s Hoover Theater where he will perform two shows and deliver three workshops, Prasanna spoke to India Currents Community Reporter Tanay Gokhale about his musical influences, his philosophy towards composition, and his dedication to music pedagogy.

Edited excerpts below.

Q. You have been playing guitar since you were very young. Have you always wanted a career in music?

Prasanna: I don’t know about a career in music, but by age five, I knew I was crazy about playing guitar, and for no particular reason. Growing up, our neighbor in Ranipet near Chennai played guitar for the church, and I guess it was the first instrument I saw anyone play.

When we moved to Chennai, I was desperate to get into a school that had guitar classes, it was some kind of an obsession with the guitar – not with any particular kind of music. When I first started playing guitar, I was about 11 years old, so by the definition of ‘prodigy,’ I was pretty late. Especially in an Indian context, they would have said, “You should have started at two and a half!” [laughs]

I did not have a super early start, and my family members were also not musicians. Both of these factors turned out to be a great blessing. The fact that I had no expectations riding on me, the fact that I could choose an instrument of my choice, and the fact that there were no restrictions to what I could play on the guitar, really helped shape my personality.

Q. Early influences?

Prasanna: I grew up listening to film music. Initially, it was R.D. Burman, M. S. Viswanathan and then, I think Ilayaraja made a big difference. In South India at the time, his music was ubiquitous, it was just a wall of music with so many amazing, guitar-centric songs.

Through friends, I was also into the famous Western pop artists of the time. I remember I tried playing Eddie Van Halen’s solo on Michael Jackson’s Beat It , on my 2-dollar acoustic guitar without knowing how ridiculous it would be! So I was completely open to anything and everything.

The big dramatic shift came when I started playing Carnatic music on the guitar, and that also was an accident. My sister was learning Carnatic vocals, so I was hearing it around the house. Listening to her sing, and trying to play all those things on the guitar felt cool, especially on acoustic guitar. I took some guitar lessons and learned some music theory but the most significant learning phase came when I studied Carnatic music under my guru Tiruvarur S. Balasubramaniam.

Six years later, I started studying music with A. Kanyakumari, probably the greatest living Carnatic violin player, at least in my book. She really shaped my journey in Carnatic music. Even now, it’s been thirty years since I started training under her and I still try to study with her whenever I can. So these are all the pivotal influences that shaped my playing during my formative years.

Q. The diversity of your influences reveals itself in your music today because you often meld genres from all over the world with your virtuosic Carnatic guitar style. What is that process like when you’re composing?

Prasanna: Early on, Ilayaraja’s music was what made my musical journey a very cross-cultural one. If I look at his body of work, it’s incredible how many styles of music appear in his music. There’s Carnatic music, some Baroque stuff, disco, and it sounds great! That shaped my thinking that you could bring a lot of different things together and make it sound cool in one song or composition.

For me, I would say Carnatic music and rock were the two main genres earlier on. I was playing in rock bands, so we were covering Santana, Deep Purple, Rush, Jethro Tull, etc. and then I was playing Carnatic music on my guitar all alone. So when I started composing, both those genres crept into my music.

Of course, when I came to the Berklee College of Music and played with so many musicians from around the world, I started engaging with other musical traditions. The key is to have an open mind and see music as one big language instead of 100 small languages.

As for the composition process, I don’t set out with the intention of combining say, jazz and reggae. For me, it was about soaking yourself completely in a musical style first. There would be months when I would only listen to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and then other months when I was only learning Carnatic krithis . And then I would go deep into a band like Steely Dan and try to play back every note, every chord, every lyric. When I started learning jazz at Berklee, that was a whole other world of learning. Western Classical was another big influence, especially Stravinsky, Ravel, and Bartok.

Later, I also got the opportunity to play and tour with a Senegalese band and learn more about their tradition of music. I got very attached to the guitar-style tradition in West African music –  Ali Farka Touré for example. Interestingly, I found that there is a semi-folk connection between that music and American styles like bluegrass and country. So that’s a huge palette, but I had to work on each of them in depth.

The guitar became a very big unifying force because, with the guitar, you can go from reggae, to African styles, to Carnatic, to metal, to funk, and so on. So now, in my compositions, I can have a Thyagaraja kind of song, with a Bob Marley-like vibe, and Ravel-like harmonies!

My entire work is now one single person – me – who has opened himself up to all of these different types of music, and that’s become my signature now.

Q. Do you ever get stuck in a rut, creatively? Any advice for musicians starting out?

Prasanna: There is no rut now, but I used to feel the rut when I had to satisfy somebody else’s expectations of me, or my own expectation of being like somebody else. For example, when I was trying to play jazz, I wanted to sound like all the great masters and I used to get very frustrated. I was like, “I’m not progressing, I’m not going anywhere”.

You have to dig deep and find yourself, find your strengths. If you can play only 14 chords properly, by all means, learn more chords, but make sure that you play those 14 chords in a way that only you can.

A lot of people feel discouraged or frustrated when they see great musicians perform. No, you should actually feel inspired that there is space for you to be creatively fertile and make something unique. So being in a rut is more of an internal thing that you need to overcome.

I can’t play everything because music is several million times bigger than who I am, and that fact should liberate me, not frustrate me.

Q. Apart from creating music, you’re also very involved in teaching music to a new crop of musicians and singers. How has that experience been?

Prasanna: I think teaching should be a very important part of a creative musician’s life, but you have to orient your teaching to be a creative pursuit. So if you teach stuff that you don’t know, and challenge yourself to learn in the pursuit of making your student play something better, or learn something, that will bring you great rewards.

On any day, for example, I’ll be teaching solo jazz piano to a student, and then teach Carnatic guitar to another student right after. I’ll be teaching orchestration MIDI production to someone next, and follow it up by analyzing Bach’s fugues with another student, and then do metal with another student.

And I have to teach across instruments like piano, trumpet, violin, viola, and so on, and my students feed me all of that. That keeps me on my toes creatively; I play more piano and guitar at home!

But my students have been the biggest revelation for me. One of my students, Maya, was on America’s Got Talent earlier this year. My student Shruti is an incredible singer-songwriter who released her single Desire recently. Neil Nayyar , another of my students from the Bay Area holds the world record for the most number of instruments played by a single person – 117! I am also helping produce some of my students’ upcoming projects and albums as well; if I was not teaching, I wouldn’t be this involved with music.

It’s like two sides of the same coin, teaching and performing. I don’t even like the word teaching because I learn a lot more from my students than the other way around. Teaching sounds preachy, it’s actually just file sharing!

To attend Guitar Prasanna’s concerts and workshops on September 14 in San Jose, write an email to sarayuc@hotmail.com . More information here .

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