IN DECEMBER, acclaimed musician Nitin Sawhney performed an original composition with his band and the Manchester-based Hallé orchestra, an intimate and powerful piece exploring themes of mortality and resilience.
The deeply personal piece was inspired by his own traumatic experience in March last year, when the 60-year-old suffered a heart attack "out of nowhere" and had a stent inserted in one of his arteries.
“I fell onto a glass ornament from a standing position, smashing the coffee table with my face as I collapsed into a pool of blood and broken shards, penetrating both cheeks, my nose and the area just beneath my eyes,” he said.
Doctors put the incident down to a generic predisposition as he had ate a balanced diet, would weight train three or four times a week, do regular kick-box sessions, run 10k and take part in triathlons.
Sawhney decided to use the experience as inspiration towards his music.
He said: "I am musically focusing on what happened around me at the time in relation to how I was medically treated. But also the aftermath of it in relation to my mental and emotional state.”
He recently composed the music for acclaimed play, A Tupperware of Ashes, starring Meera Syal as Queenie, a character that suffers from Alzheimer and looks at the effect it has on identity.
“(The heart attack) made me think about what really matters and what we leave behind. I don’t fear death, but I do wonder about the next 20 or 30 years. A Tupperware of Ashes brought up similar questions about identity and existence, and I think my recent experience made me more attuned to the emotional core of the play,” he told New Wave Magazine.
Sawhney described the play as a “moving story” that made him cry.
He told the magazine: “I wanted the score to reflect her experiences, so I brought in Bengali influences and worked with a singer who sings in both Bengali and English. I also referenced music from Rabindranath Tagore, one of the most famous figures from the Bengali renaissance, whose work is used in the play,” he said.
“Additionally, I used Indian classical instruments like the bansuri to explore Queenie’s internal psychology and her gradual fading away. The challenge was to find a musical vocabulary that could express her journey both historically and internally.”
He added: “I think people are very open to music from other cultures now. With A Tupperware of Ashes, because of the nature of the story, I didn’t feel concerned about using Indian instruments like the tabla, bansuri, or sitar. It’s part of Queenie’s world, and the script gives me permission to do that. My focus was on reflecting her character as authentically as possible, without worrying about how people would react.”
His other highlights from the past year include writing the music for Disney Nature film Tiger and performing at Glastonbury with his band.
His last album, Identity, released in October 2023, brought together different voices from singers Joss Stone and Guy Garvey to Asian women asylum seekers and television host Gary Lineker.
“Identity as a subject of discourse or debate on social media and mainstream media has become increasingly distorted so that it's very much about a kind of pejorative judgment ... of people's identity ... quite often on the basis of prejudice rather than understanding," Sawhney told Reuters.
“So I thought it would be great to actually make an album that's a celebration of identity effectively and it's really ... inviting a lot of people that I respect and admire as artists to participate in a collective, kind of, speaking out about how they feel about their own identities.”
The album featured surprise collaborator Lineker, whom Sawhney approached after the BBC had suspended the presenter for criticising the then Conservative government’s immigration policy.
The suspension brought a public backlash and near mutiny at the public broadcaster and the BBC later reinstated Lineker as host of flagship Premier League highlights show Match Of The Day.
"I thought, here's a safe space that you could actually express whatever you want to and he did," Sawhney said.
The result was the track Illegal, which also features the voices of Asian women asylum seekers and concludes with Lineker saying "No one is illegal".
Sawhney has been a long-time campaigner of social causes, openly speaking about issues such as immigration and racism.
“We have a responsibility as people to be kind and thoughtful to those who are less fortunate than us. That's a basic human principle as far as I'm concerned,” he said.
Sawhney was born in Rochester, Kent to first-generation British-Indian parents. Inspired by his parents and brothers, as a child he studied piano, classical and flamenco guitar, sitar and tabla.
"My mum and dad both listened to Indian classical music, but also flamenco, Cuban music, a lot of crooners and a lot of pop. My brothers listened to a lot of rock music. So, I was listening to everything from the Doors to Led Zeppelin and a lot of jazz,” he said.
Like many south Asians, his parents wanted him to be a doctor. He studied law and was on his way to becoming an accountant. He then broke the news that his heart lay in the arts. While on his accountancy course he met another icon, Sanjeev Bhaskar, who was doing business studies.
“We really clicked,” he recalled. “We were inseparable for quite a long time, and we shared a flat for 10 years or something like that in Tooting (London). That's where Goodness Gracious Me kind of started in a way because we did Secret Asians, which was a comedy duo, and we started doing that up and down the country, which is really good fun.”
“At that time, people were talking about the Asian underground, and I was part of this scene of DJs who were doing the club scene in London. I'd already released albums. I was signed to Outcaste Records, an independent Asian label, and everything went amazingly well after that.”
The Ivors Academy honoured him with a lifetime achievement award at the 2017 Ivor Novello Awards.
For the past four years he has been the chair of the PRS Foundation, and one of his highlights are the grants it gives to young musicians of colour. And the prestigious Booker Prize has asked him to be one of the judges.
Sawhney turned down an OBE in 2007, stating that it was associated with "a colonial past". In 2019, he accepted a CBE revealing his father had died regretting that Sawhney had rejected the OBE.
“I identify myself as somebody who loves music, who enjoys life as much as I can,” he said. “Someone who feels a sense of responsibility, because I've had quite a lucky, fortunate privileged existence – things have gone well for me.”
