From an ocean apart, two musical greats have come together to save the Earth.
Divine Tides, an album co-composed by Grammy®️-Award winning artists Stewart Copeland (based in Los Angeles) and Ricky Kej (based in Bangalore, India) will premiere on July 21. It is a tribute to the natural world, presented through a musical canvas of diverse soundscapes, melodies, rhythms and ambient textures that Kej and Copeland have interwoven.
Divine Tides features 9 songs and 8 music videos filmed around the world. And if the splendour of the recently-released video single “Himalayas” is anything to go by, the album will be a stunner. In the single, the intricate melodies intersperse with elemental percussive rhythms against the backdrop of the majestic Himalayan Mountains. The result is a visceral feeling that is at once grand and sobering. If the disquieting contrast – with humans as a self-important but small part of our planet – does not imprint on our collective conscience, then what on earth will?
Composer and conservationist Kej has made it a personal and musical quest to raise environmental awareness and compel people to care and act. Last year, he created My Earth Songs Virtual Live Concert with American musician Lonnie Park, and this virtual children’s concert to benefit UNICEF was a global hit. (Read the interview with Kej and Ron Kob here.) Divine Tides seems poised to create a similar impact through a musical style all its own: versatility is a hallmark of the prolific Kej.
Creating the album offered him the opportunity to once again work with his “musical hero” Copeland, with whom he collaborated on a song in 2016. This time, explains Kej, he “mustered the courage” to ask Copeland to work together on a complete album. Copeland, of course, is best known as founder and drummer of the 5-time Grammy®️ Award winning, Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inducted rock giant The Police. As a solo artist and composer, he has scored more than 50 Hollywood movies, including the Golden Globe Award nominated Rumble Fish and the Academy-Award winning Wall Street. He has also composed orchestral music, the soundtrack to the video game Spyro, and the opera The Tell Tale Heart, based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe. He is also one quarter of the rock megagroup Gizmodrome, which he founded. So he’s a pretty busy guy!
Kej had been working on a follow-up to his Grammy®-Award winning album Winds of Samsara (2014), and had catalogued some of his favourite ideas. But his relentless touring schedule was preventing any recording. Enter COVID-19. “When the pandemic hit, it presented an opportunity for me to spend time in my studio and kick-start this project,” recalls Kej. Copeland recalls an unexpected call from Kej “one day during the Apocalypse” – with a proposition to make an album together. Kej had assembled an amazing collection of deeply traditional musicians in the exotic context of his inspired production style, and he sent Copeland some tracks. Copeland listened, growing excited. His first thought was, “this is already extremely cool. How can I not screw this up! But he insisted that I screw this up!” Given Copeland’s immense experience with various forms of music in various media, Kej had “complete and absolute faith in Stewart’s thoughts and suggestions.” There was no question of screwing up: “Every one of them took the album and the music to the next level.”
Kej likens working with Copeland to “attending the best Masterclass imaginable. Stewart is not just a living legend, but also an extremely humble human being.” Each song on Divine Tides has “strong Indian roots with a fusion of the west. And the entire album celebrates the magnificence of our natural world and the resilience of our species. Stewart and I constantly threw ideas at each other, adapted sounds, and crafted this album together piece by piece.”
Copeland grew up with a different kind of Asian music: Arabic. “The effect that it had at an early age was to increase the elasticity of my brain. I am more tolerant of a wider range of sounds than someone who grew up in Laguna Beach, California. And those different melodic twists, those different intervals that don’t get used or heard in Western music to me are like mother’s milk.” So working with such elements that Kej had assembled came naturally to Copeland. “But more than that, it’s that I haven’t had an opportunity to play with these elements because I was in a rock band, and I am writing music for classical orchestra. So to play with these ethnic elements, these different cultural tides, as it were, is very inspiring, very moving.” He smiles at the recollection, “Besides, I got to mike up all my cool stuff!” That seldom-used “cool stuff” includes his “crotales, spin gong, and my Chinese bells, and all these peculiar little instruments that I had never been called to actually record before. They are fun to play. And for this album, I am able to pull out all these special toys.”
No stranger to working with musical luminaries over his career, Kej is effusive in his praise of Copeland, who is at the “pinnacle of success”. Copeland is tenth on Rolling Stone Magazine’s “100 Greatest Drummers of All Time”, yet continues to evolve and learn by exploring new sounds, traditional music instruments and rhythms: “Stewart is a living legend and also an extremely humble human being filled with knowledge, wisdom, and positive energy. His infectious personality and his artistry really shone through and made this collaboration one of the most fulfilling personal and musical experiences of my life.”
The respect is mutual. In Copeland’s words, “The elements that Ricky has put together in Divine Tides are all deeply steeped in tradition and classical music language, but the way he has pieced them together is utterly unique.” And the emotional impact of this mix of cultures is so profound that Copeland finds himself “moved to tears by the beauty of this music”.
Videos of eight of the album’s nine tracks are being released one per week, starting on July 7. Kej collaborated with acclaimed filmmakers from around the world to shoot these videos in diverse locations, including Leh, Tamil Nadu, The Western Ghats, the North-East of India, Thar Desert, Los Angeles, and Spain. Kej is “very happy” with the way they turned out, and is excited to showcase them: “As you can imagine, it was a challenge to shoot these videos during the pandemic, but it was also a blessing in disguise as we could showcase Mother Earth in all of her glory since most of the world’s population were indoors.”
He sees all of the songs as vital pieces of the larger picture, which is the complete album. This is why they needed to make eight music videos: “We felt that all of the tracks need their moment in the sun to shine individually, and to coexist as a complete piece of art together on a diverse musical canvas.”
Kej knows well that the pandemic has been “an extremely challenging time for everyone”. By showcasing the beauty of our planet through music, Divine Tides conveys Kej’s simple yet compelling message to “never lose hope”. His own most fundamental hopes for the planet and its people are undimmed: “that we can all take some time to reconnect with our loved ones, reflect on our relationship with nature, and live sustainably.” And as a genuine support with this, he offers a gentle suggestion: that people “please do listen to the album, when it is out”.
For his part, Copeland admits that “I am a bit stumped as to how I can personally save the world… but if music, even if just instrumental, can make you feel, and the references are there, to deeper issues, through a pretty tune, then I am all for it. Because I can feel there is more to this music than just a pretty tune.”
The transcendent Divine Tides debuts on all streaming platforms on July 21, 2021. Prepare to be swept away.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021
