SULTANS AT THE CYBER: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS MCKHOOL

On February 3rd, JUNO (Canada’s Grammy) nominees Sultans of String are holding the release party for their new album Subcontinental Drift with special guest sitar master Anwar Khurshid at Cyber Cafe West. Head Sultan and 6-string violinist Chris McKhool and I chatted recently about Pangaea, Anwar’s journey from Pakistan to Canada, and the mysterious subject of string theory, which neither of us had very much to say about:

TCC: I want to ask you: if continental drift is the movement of the Earth’s continents relative to each other, then what is subcontinental drift?

CM: Ha! Well, it’s the movement of the music of the continents relative to each other. Like, the way we thought of it was, Anwar had come from the subcontinent playing traditional Indian music. But music doesn’t stay static: it changes with its environment. So when he arrived here in Canada twenty years ago, he started exploring different kinds of things that he could do with the sitar. And meeting us was great for both of us because we love playing world music, and in a typical show we play everything from Cuban salsa, to rumba from Spain, Arabic rhythms, east coast Celtic rhythms... and then bringing in this classical Indian music approach and seeing it evolve into something really relatable, really accessible; it was fun for us, and really informed our music a lot. And for Anwar it was an interesting process, our pop music sensibilities-- which we have just by virtue of being born in North America. Thinking of songs as being three and a half minutes long, it was a good and fun learning curve for him as well. Because typically a song that he would play would maybe-- he could be playing for half an hour on the sitar and he's just warming up on a song. And I'm always thinking, ‘what is the listener in the room going to think after the first five minutes?’ So we're really good for each other that way, in the songwriting and recording process.

TCC: I really like your answer. It makes me wonder: do you suppose it's possible that it is not in fact tectonic plates that are moving the continents, but that it could be the music being played on top of the continents?

CM: Well, absolutely! And I think if you research the Silk Road at all, and you know, the movement of people and goods and spices through Asia-- or if you study, um, the development of the human race since the beginning-- it's really interesting to see how food and culture and language and the genome changes over time as everything fans out from Africa through the world. And it's the same with music: it's such an exciting time right now, because previously it would take, you know, lifetimes for a certain style of music from a little village in India to makes its way across the world-- you would need a human host to carry that musical tradition and pass it along to their children, and so on and so on. And people immigrated or emigrated around the world. Now we've got Youtube and airplanes.

TCC: Ha!

CM: I can sit in my living room and hear any style of music, from anywhere in the world. And the possibilities are endless. Mashing together two styles, or taking instruments that aren't usually used in a certain style to play it differently… It's a very exciting time to be alive… completely lost on millennials who have grown up with the internet and don't realize how incredibly insane it all is right now.

TCC: It's interesting. It makes me think of the story of Babel. I wonder, music being nonverbal, if it's music that's ultimately, like, doing the heavy lifting of bringing language back into a place where it isn't creating conflict between different peoples.

CM: Well that's exactly what we try to do with our music. Like we're actually trying to emulate a model for world peace in our own tiny little way, because we have two completely musical worlds coming together, and sometimes they understand each other and sometimes they don't. And that's part of the artistic process too, right? You write a hundred songs so that you can have five really good ones to put on the album. Even more so when we're combining these really disparate music styles. And yet there's enough common ground to create something new and something exciting that hopefully hasn't been said before. It's way better than anything we could create with just Kevin and I sitting around, or Anwar just sitting alone in his room in the subcontinent. That's kind of the Canadian ideal of multiculturalism, which is the mosaic, the sense of the mosaic. You look up at a stained glass window of a church, and you see all those beautiful colors and they all come together to make one beautiful image. And that's what we're trying to do, sort of on a daily basis in our lives and with our music.

TCC: Speaking of Anwar, I read that he moved to Canada from Pakistan so that he could play the music that he wants to with more freedom. What kind of restrictions are there on musicians in Pakistan?

CM: Well, it's a little bit complicated. There are certain religious factions that would not want to have any music playing at all. And in the village where he was, he was not allowed to play his sitar in public. But, he loved the sitar. He really felt like the sitar was his voice. And so it's kind of an interesting thing, like what if you find out the one thing that you know to be true is something that you're being denied? And it's not dissimilar from our percussionist's story: sometimes we record with Rosendo Chendy Leon, and he's from Cuba. And he also came to North America, drawn there specifically as a place where he can be free, to speak his voice and to live his truth and not worry about being thrown in jail for having an opinion contrary to the government. With both these band members, we've created a space where they can be themselves musically, living in a very diverse city where they don't have to worry about people acting out against them just for being who they are. And when you hear Anwar play the sitar, you realize that's really who he is, right? To deny the musical expression of a human being is really to quash their soul.

TCC: It's funny, I imagine that some citizens of the United States hearing the kind of world music that you guys are making might never imagine how rebellious it is. We have this whole mythos of rock n roll or rap music being like the lineage of rebellion, right?

CM: Yeah.

TCC: Wild stuff.

CM: You're absolutely right. People are freaking out in the ‘50s and ‘60s about rock n roll turning into other more adventurous forms of music, but yeah. Think of it: the rebellion of rock ‘n roll in the fifties-- that's basically what Anwar is doing from his culture.

TCC: Do you know anything about string theory?

CM: Uh, just absolutely rudimentary basics. We considered calling our band String Theory at one point but there's another band called that.

TCC: I don't know anything about string theory, but I thought that it would be a funny question to ask you. CM: Ha!

TCC: What projects do you have in the works right now?

CM: Well, we're releasing Subcontinental Drift, so we're doing a lot of touring right now: Canada, the U.S., and our first real big tour in the U.K. is coming up in June. At the same time we're recording a Christmas album-- just for something completely different-- and calling on some really fantastic special guests to work with us. Some of them are Canadian, like Benoit Bourque from Bottine Souriante, and Alex Cuba, who just won a Grammy and a Latin Grammy; and then some international guests like Paddy Maloney from the Chieftains, doing some pennywhistle playing with us; and some really fantastic guests in the U.S. who we're not allowed to name quite yet because it's not public knowledge, but it's really super fancy. So that's been really fun to write, and we're going to start, you know, really digging in with the recording process.

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Tie your shoes and hold on to your passports! The planet of sound re-congeals at Cyber Cafe West at 176 Main Street in Binghamton, NY on February 3rd at 8 pm. Tickets are $10 and available at the door.