DW You were a part of Ezee Meat. Which was a successful rock band. Why did you choose to exit that scene?
Sanjay Well I never got out of it man. It was never a planned move. It just happened. The situation arose in such a way…and it was time to move on. Then I went to Bombay and for me it was great timing and great luck, that the first guy I played with was Ranjit Barot. And yeah…played with great musicians…Karl Peters, Taufiq Qureshi, Sridhar Parthasarthy who's a Karnatic Percussionist of a great caliber and Vedamurthy who is a brilliant Karnatic Saxophone player. Played Ranjit's compositions…rock tunes, but treated in a different way.

You realize that…when you're in a rock band it's a very protected atmosphere. You have a set sound…your amps, your pedals…all these things make for a very comfortable place to be in. you have your fan base. When you don't have your band, you're an individual and you have no fan base. You're a "nobody" after that. Then you realize that, music is much more broader than being part of a rock band.

DW So how do you look back to the days when you were with Ezee Meat?
Sanjay Fuck man, it was great! Awesome! It's like you're doing what you want to do. We were influenced by bands like Rock Machine and Nemesis Avenue , they were bands for whom performance was a very important factor.

For me Mahesh Tinaikar was a big influence and inspiration. This is a guy for whom guitar playing was a serious affair.

DW Were you always into jazz? Did you listen to jazz when you were in a rock band?
Sanjay No, never man. Jazz for me was Gibberish. There was just anything happening…they're just playing any notes. But as a rock guitar player if you clock in so much time you come to a phase where you realize that they have different names for the same bunch of notes. I think most guitar players learn shapes wise. We don't say like this is a pentatonic shape and this is an A and C and G and D and E. No, fuck it. It's a box. That's how I looked at it and that's how most guitar players look at it.

And then you listen to players like Steve Lukather and Nuno Bettencourt. These are the guys I hold fully responsible for pushing me into jazz when you hear these guys solo, you know it's not rock. They're playing over the same rock chord progressions…but why is he sounding different? Or just like a straight 116 bar Bm comp, but why is he sounding that way? That's what actually pushed me into jazz. Then one good thing to do is find out who influenced the guys who influenced you. And keep tracing back. Then I realized I need to get a little hardcore with my playing and understand theory much better.

So what I did was I took up a 9-month contract, playing at the Blue Diamond Hotel with a piano player who plays dinner music. The music's coming out of small speakers in the ceilings. People were eating dinner and the sounds of the forks and spoons was louder than the music. And no one notices the band and if they notice, they ask you to play happy birthday. But it worked out perfectly for me because I could go out there and play "Ipanema" four times in succession and no one would really bother man. After playing Am / G / F…suddenly you're playing Fmaj7 to F#Maj7 and then you're going to G7 and Gm7. then you realize the if it's a slow ballad you can manage to play the simple, everyday chord shapes. But if it's really quick you're lost. So you realize how good you've got to get as a musician and guitar player.

DW How did you get to meet Mike Stern man?
Sanjay Man it's very strange. I was with this friend of mine Sagar and we met him after the gig and said, "Mike…we're great fans of yours, we'd like to meet you". He said, "give me your number". We said yeah ok…here take my number (not expecting him to call back). Next morning at about 8 O Clock we get this call…Hey man this is Mike Stern, what's Your name? Where did we meet? So we told him. So he said ok come to the Oberoi, room number so and so and get your amp and you guitar and come. So we went and he was sitting and working out Pagannini's Caprices. I had worked out one of his tunes called chromosone. So I played that. Then he told me to play some funk, play some blues…some scales. Then he told me to sing a G note over an Emaj chord. That was tough for me. So he told me to work on my ear. The way I look back at it…everything happened in perfect time.

DW You've been gigging a lot in Pune, Mumbai…everywhere. What kind of gigs have you been doing?
Sanjay Well there's this regular band I play with. I've been playing with Joe Alvares for the last year now. I've played more gigs with him than I have with a lot of people cause he just manages to get them man! There are lot of super talented people out there but no one has the time to get gigs and manages to get the right kind of people together. We're playing a lot of jazz, a lot of standards, lot of funk, jazz/rock, blues.

DW Who are the guys in the band?
Sanjay there's Gino Banks (drums). Bass players keep shifting. There's Sheldon, there's a senior guy called Bertie. There's another brilliant jazz drummer called Adrian De Souza. Harmeet…keyboard player. Tala plays keyboard and sax. Joe Alvares sings and there is Shefali…who also sings.

There's also this Karnatic fusion band as well, which doesn't happen too often but whenever it happens it's great. Sridhar Parthasarthy plays percussion, Rama plays the violin, Harmeet plays the keyboard and I play guitar. Its all raga based.

DW Do you listen to Karnatic music?
Sanjay Yeah. A lot.

DW Do you study it as well?
Sanjay I've just started. Indian classical music is deep. 2 - 3 years back it was boring for me. I couldn't sit with one scale for hours, but now I dig doing that. As a guitar player I've been used to shapes. In Indian classical music every note is an entity. That's how you study it. Hopefully this approach will be part of my overall playing. I've been studying with Suresh Kumar, who is U Srinivas' student. He used to be a rock guitar player in college. I've been listening to this kind of music for a long time. Prasanna has been a great influence on my direction, not my playing because I haven't sat down and worked out his stuff.

When my teacher played the Shankara Varnam scale for me…which is the major scale, my mouth was hanging open because I'd never heard the major scale sound like that. It was slightly demeaning because you're supposed to be a decent player who can about play and suddenly you realize that you cannot.

DW alright, getting off fusion now. How did Bombay Black happen for you?
Sanjay I haven't played too many gigs with Bombay black. Whenever I'm around or have the time, I just go play with them. Its an association of friends, its not a band as such.

DW For you jazz is just an extension of your repertoire. But that's not how most audiences think. You have your exclusive jazz audience and rock audience. Do you see people opening up to "music" as a whole?
Sanjay You have people who say, "Oh, you're playing jazz". As though it's superior to everything else. It's another form of music. I guess people feel it's sophisticated and it's up market. It's like people look at broccoli in the same way. Fuck it's a vegetable man. Or tofu…people say "arre yeh to 5 star mein hi khate hain"…"sirf pali hill ke log khate hain". Just keep your view open…it's food man. Or it's music.

DW the mentality towards music is pretty closed in India as you're just pointed out. What do you think can help this situation?
Sanjay It's opening out. Lets put it that way. I went for this expo where there were a lot of instruments out on display. And there were a lot of kids out there banging on drums and checking out guitars and pedals. It'll definitely happen. Just look at music like music. Let it affect you the way music is supposed to affect you.

DW where was this expo?
Sanjay Goregaon (Mumbai). Nsc ground. It was basically a digital cinema and music related expo.

DW You told me once that you're not into repetition where your guitar playing is concerned…
Sanjay let me rephrase that. I have bunch of licks that are my own. In the sense, this is what I've been playing. It just comes out, I can't help it.
DW So you're not into repletion in the Neo-Classical sense…?
Sanjay Yeah. But neo classical is another genre all together. It's classical based. Hats off to the guitar players who brought that into the front. Like Marty Friedman or Jason Becker, Vinnie Moore and all those cats. It's a disciplined art form. Very serious and disciplined. I have a feeling that sometime in my life I'm gonna be playing classical music.

DW Lets go back to when you were a kid. At what age did you first pick up the guitar?
Sanjay In the Eight standard. I just lick up a guitar that had been lying around for quite a while. One day I saw my dad playing a Dmaj chord and thought…ok that's simple…so I played that! the next day at school the teacher asked if anybody in class plays the guitar. And I said yes! I knew one chord man! Dad asked me which song we were going to sing and he taught me the chords. Those years were the best because I was always discovering things. I just read somewhere that all kids who want to learn music should be left alone when they pick up an instrument.

DW Were you self-taught? Did you ever take lessons?
Sanjay No man. The moment you realize things on your own its fixed in your brain. I think a couple of years back I went to Sanjay Divecha for one lesson. He showed me intervals and all. So that's about it man.

DW Once you started taking music more seriously, did you have a strict practice routine or did you just…play?
Sanjay there were these two years in my life when I took up my own place on Napier road (Pune). It was the band practice place and I was living there.just those two years man and I think I'm still winging it on those two years…technically. Right now I don't "practice", I sit and play a lot though. If I find that I need to work on a particular aspect of something new that I'm doing…yeah I sit and work it out.

DW Which guitars do you use?
Sanjay Right now I have a Gibson Epiphone, a fender Squire and a Nylon String acoustic.

DW What about your effects?
Sanjay I've scaled my effects down. I use an ME 6 for reverbs and delays. A "Jackhammer" for distortion, a Dunlop Crybaby wah pedal . I started with stomp boxes and then switched to processors, which, personally, is the most fucked up thing I did for my playing. The quality of each individual effect suffers because there are like 55 effects crammed into a processor. I have this tube preamp. It's the best thing I've ever got. Unfortunately it's very unreliable as all tubes are. Right now I'm really working on trying to get my sound together. But I think I'm going stick to stomp boxes.

DW Do you chose which guitar to use according to what sort of gig it is that you're playing?
Sanjay well if I had a guitar tech I would take all my guitars. It's a bithc to carry the guitars around because you've got to keep them in tune.

DW I've seen you play acoustic just once and you were using your nylon string guitar. So is it always nylon strings for you?
Sanjay yeah. I think it keeps my playing together and I love the sound of it. I was playing a lot of Antonio Carlos Jobim and that's the perfect guitar to play his music on.

DW You've started putting up lessons on drummingworld.com. What is it that you hope to get across to the readers apart form all the technical and theoretical know how? From your approach to music…
Sanjay That's the reason I've been taking so much time to come up with the next lesson. I'm thinking very hard as to what I should put up. Honestly, there's loads of information out on the net right now that's very easily accessible. By putting out the same things, I'm not going to really help anyone. What I can do is just share my approach to music. When I used to give lessons earlier, I never used to spoon-feed them. Just by the questions they used to ask me, I knew whether they'd worked on what I'd given them. We're all individuals. Why deprive the world for that matter, of an individual statement. No player wants someone else to sound like them. That's not how it's meant to be. Yeah so that's what I'd like to achieve with these lessons. Just share my approach.

DW You've played with a lot of musicians from India, Any influences?
Sanjay When I was starting out Mahesh Tinaikar was a Big Influence,when I saw Rock machine for the first time he was the serious cat I totally dug that. Ranjit Barot, 7 yrs back it was a reality check, its like you're in a rock band for 7 yrs you move, your first gig is with Ranjit and there I am listening to great 80s pop, Fusion,
Jazz, Funk, RnB, Karnatik that pretty much set my musical direction. Sridar Parthasarthy. Louis banks is a super encouraging person. It helps especialy when you're interested in a form of music that dont have too many teachers here. Smitha apts (Louis Banks' place) is like Jazz hub for scores of musicians in Bombay. As of now I'm having the time of my life playing with a serious bunch of musicians

DW Anyone you'd like to work with, whom you haven't already worked with?
Sanjay Yeah. In the commercial aspect I'd love to play with A.R. Rahman and record for him. He's one gigantic composer man.

DW Do you write music? Do you have the time to compose?
Sanjay I do but not in a big way. I need to work on that. I have loads of ideas. I got a small recording set up in Bombay so it's going to be much more. But yeah you're right, you need time for that.

DW When you do write…it's going to be an amalgamation of all the styles and ideas you're picked up all your life?
Sanjay Yeah. Totally. It probably won't even be guitar based. The guitar may not be the highlighted instrument. It's not just the music. Things like the land I live in. India, Maharashtra, the people I've met, what's happening with the country today. There are people who influence you who are not musicians you know. And situations that influence you. So I'm just just finding out a way to put all that into perspective in my music.

DW By writing you mean musical compositions only or do you write lyrics as well?
Sanjay No I don't write lyrics. I mean I write as in…I just out down ideas. But I don't write lyrics.

DW Which was the first gig you did?
Sanjay Some school annual day thing man. Played some rock tunes for that. that was long time back! The father in school said, "you rock musicians, long haired fuckin drug addicts…get out of here"!!!

DW Ok. This is a fun question. It's also my favourite one. What would your dream jam be like?
Sanjay Dream Jam huh…this is a difficult one! Man…this is a very tough one! I would be Gary Willis on bass (of tribal tech fame). Drums would be Vinnie Colaiuta or Dennis Chambers. Keyboard player would have to be someone who's playing is really sparse. Like the whole Bill Evans vibe. Yeah may be Bill Evans man! And Kenny Garrett playing sax.