Bollywood and film music may continue to dominate the charts, but it’s classical musicians who have “actually broken cultural barriers”, triple-Grammy award-winning musician Ricky Kej said at Expresso on Culture by The Indian Express in Bengaluru.

Kej described the phenomenon as the “Pandit Ravi Shankar effect”, elaborating that while mainstream Bollywood music could attract the Indian diaspora abroad, classical musicians like Ravi Shankar drew crowds from across national boundaries.

“I remember seeing a concert of his when I was 19 years old in the Bay Area. Until then, I had seen a lot of Bollywood concerts in America, and they were filled with people from the Indian diaspora. But when I went for this Pandit Ravi Shankar concert, I was shocked that the demographic inside the theatre was representative of the demographic of the city (San Francisco) itself,” he said.

Kej also spoke about his environmentalist outlook and his collaborations with veteran musicians such as Stewart Copeland, founder and drummer of the English rock band The Police. The two worked together on the album ‘Divine Tides’. Kej recalled how he decided to wait and see the results of Copeland’s musical decisions, which he might not have initially agreed with.

“I decided that I am going to hold on to it for two weeks… when I lived with that particular piece of music, or that particular idea, for more than two weeks, or two weeks, then I started gaining perspective, and I realised that he was right every single time,” Kej revealed.

Before his music career, Kej spent over 13 years in advertising, composing for an estimated 3,500 commercials. “I would wake up at 7 am and deliver the client’s brief by about 2 pm. It was the greatest learning experience I had in music,” he said.

Kej also spoke about his rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, noting that culture and the arts are now seen as part of infrastructure and soft power. He recalled being invited to a meeting, where PM Modi suggested that he work on an album on climate change and unity, with artists from across the world. This later culminated in ‘Shanti Samsara’.

Speaking about artificial intelligence (AI) in music, Kej compared it to the arrival of virtual instrument programs in the 2000s. AI, he said, would simply be another tool—useful to create quick and generic musical compositions. Human composers would adapt it in musical compositions that displayed skill and innovation, he added.