Why Stewart Copeland and the environment matter to two-time Grammy winner Ricky Kej

In March of 1980 the legendary British new-wave rock band The Police came visiting Mumbai for what would be their only performance in the country — a charity concert, put together by the Parsi women of Time and Talent club. Lead vocalist and bassist Sting, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers took the now-defunct Rang Bhavan open theatre in south Bombay’s Dhobi Talao by storm. The talk-of-the-town gig created a seminal moment in the history of rock concerts in India. Kej, who was born a year later, in North Carolina, the US, would go on to hear about the iconic concert from his father, who, in the ’80s, was fascinated by great bands and had “an enviable music collection,” says Kej, 40, who fell in love with the band’s punk rock sound the moment he heard them and found Copeland’s music to be extremely striking.

At the time, Copeland was quite discernible given his fierce intensity on the cymbals. “I found something very poetic about Stewart’s drumming… It was truly the backbone of the band and gave the songs of The Police so much emotion,” he says. And so, posters of The Police and Copeland adorned the wall in Kej’s bedroom in Bengaluru, where the family moved when he was eight.
But Kej, who for years got busy making advertisement jingles, never factored in the possibility of a collaboration with an artiste he revered, much less the thought of winning a Grammy together.

As Kej grew as a musician after his first Grammy win, he was keen on doing a follow-up to the album. But concerts and travel kept him from focussing on making music. And then, the pandemic hit. “The pandemic forced us all to stay indoors and that gave me the opportunity to create a new album. The more I created, the more I kept feeling the need for a collaborator. This had to be somebody who was not just a virtuoso musician but somebody who would help in the writing process, too. The first person who came to mind was Stewart Copeland. I wanted to overreach because he’s somebody who’s shaped my career, by my just listening to his music,” he says.

2) After the win, for Divine Tides (Lahiri Music) in the Best New Age Album category, with collaborator, the drummer of the yesteryear new-wave band The Police, Stewart Copeland at the 64th Grammy Awards in Las Vegas

It was his British friend and mentor Ralph Simon, a music-publishing veteran, who got Kej and Copeland introduced. To Kej’s astonishment Copeland agreed after listening to some of the album’s music. Then followed a year of sending Web files to each other, phone calls, Zoom e-meets, remote recording sessions, remote videos, and Kej changing his sleep cycle to work with Copeland’s Los Angeles timings. The result, after almost a year, is Divine Tides — the nine-song album that’s an ode to the natural world, the resilience of its species. It stems from Kej’s deep interest in environmental activism. Not only does he prefer public transport to cars and gets his carbon footprint audited every quarter, he’s worked with the government of Andhra Pradesh to promote “zero-budget natural farming”, a technique that avoids the use of chemicals and pesticides, made a song Jai Kisaan (2020) with the tribal farmers of Andhra, and is a supporter and ambassador for a number of UN bodies.

Divine Tides is also an album that was entirely created online. In fact, Kej and Copeland met in person for the first time only seven days ahead of the 64th Grammy Awards.

The two of them have woven diverse soundscapes and elaborate ambient textures by incorporating scores of musicians into the mix. The haunting Our Home features Sangeeta Kaur, the Vietnamese-American vocalist who won a Grammy of her own, too, this year. Himalayas is an ode to the highest mountain range on Earth, with chants, Hindustani classical vocals, sitar interludes and myriad percussion sounds. Gandhi, a gentle ballad appreciating frogs, one of the oldest species on the planet, dwells on the Mahatma’s quote: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”. “The idea is that if you treat the voiceless well, that means that the moral compass of the country is in place,” says Kej, who wanted to gently draw in people to the idea.
Kej grew up in a wooded area, amid creepy-crawlies. When his family would run away or step on them, it would bother Kej as a child. “I realised early on that there was a significance to each and every species in the ecosystem. Then there was music, which also came from nature — sound of birds, wind, water, trees,” he says.

Growing up in a Punjabi-Marwari family in Bengaluru, glued to his father’s diverse music collection that ranged from Michael Jackson, Bee Gees, Elvis Presley, Paul Simon, and a lot of African, European and Russian music, Kej decided early on to make music his life’s path. But his doctor-father wasn’t convinced. So, he joined the city’s Oxford Dental College, in 1999, for a course in dental surgery. “I made a deal with my father that once I get the degree, my life would be my own,” says Kej, who played with a couple of bands in college that led him to radio commercials. “In dental college, I began to take on jingle projects. I completed my degree a few years later but did not practise for even a day,” says Kej, who made commercials for a number of brands, from foods and beverages companies to telecom, creating music for more than 3,500 commercials. “It was the best music education I could have got, working with diverse clients from all over the world,” he says, having created a huge network of musicians through his work on the commercials.

But he stopped making commercial music in 2013, having figured out that if these multinational brands used music as a powerful medium to sell products, it could very well convey messages that mattered to him. “Why not talk about subjects such as deforestation and gender inequality, which are close to my heart, through music?” he thought, and now plans to make music only to make a positive social impact, to make the world a better place “in my tiny capacity,” says Kej.