Charu Suri’s voice comes across the air waves from Verona, New Jersey, as clear and crisp as the spring morning she has just woken up to. We chat about the unrelenting summer in India, a time that the Madurai-born, Chennai-raised Charu remembers as a season of mangoes and lessons in classical music.
“I was about five when I started playing the piano in Nigeria where my father was the CEO of a record company. My family was into Indian classical music and when we returned to Madras when I was nine, I was under the tutelage of one of the best piano teachers in the city – Mrs Gita Menon. She shaped both my musical direction and discipline. I started winning a lot of competitions, both national and international, and then received a scholarship to Princeton to continue my musical education, where I composed for the chamber orchestra. I was lucky to have cellist Yo Yo Ma and bassist Edgar Meyer perform my pieces,” says Charu, a journalist, who since has played across four continents, and is among the few female composers from India to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Charu will return to the Hall in April 2024 to perform from her latest album Rags and Ragas, perhaps the first to dovetail New Orleans jazz with Indian ragas. “I fell in love with jazz after a visit to New Orleans where I heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for the first time live. I was also brewing the idea of melding my Indian heritage into jazz, and New Orleans was the perfect fabric to do it, with its melting pot of cultures,” says Charu, whose other albums are Lollipops for Breakfast, Book of Ragas and New American Songbook.
