From Carnegie Hall To Kabir In Varanasi: How LA-Based Musician Aditya Prakash Is Redefining What Carnatic Music Can Be

There are musicians who carry their tradition like a carefully folded heirloom. And then there are musicians like Aditya Prakash, who carry it like a living, breathing animal: one that refuses instructions, or wanders off in unexpected directions, only to return with something extraordinary in its mouth. Talking to Aditya feels a bit like talking to someone who has accidentally pried open a door that connects centuries of Carnatic history to a restless, jazz-soaked, global present.

At 16, when most of us were still negotiating our place in the school lunch queue, Aditya was negotiating stage cues with Ravi Shankar. Carnegie Hall, The Hollywood Bowl, Disney Concert Hall... venues that sound like myth until you hear them in the gentle matter-of-fact way he recounts them. “It showed me the possibilities of Indian classical music... the reach it could have,” he told us via Zoom from Singapore where he was playing last week. Before that tour, he sang largely to South Indian audiences; after it, he saw people of all backgrounds respond to a tradition he once feared made him “other.”

“It gave me a sense of pride about my heritage,” he said. “Growing up, I felt othered because I was obsessed with Carnatic music and none of my friends listened to it.” You get the feeling this is a recurring theme in his life: the push and pull between worlds, the tug of belonging, the negotiation between who he is and who the world thinks he should be.

Between Cultures, Between Grammars

Some people study ethnomusicology to analyse culture from a safe intellectual distance. Aditya went to UCLA and ended up meeting jazz musicians who treated his tradition like a puzzle they couldn’t wait to solve. He tells us the academic part was fine but the late-night jam sessions with classmates who discovered similarity among their grammars? That’s what changed him.

It’s a lovely irony: he travelled across the world to understand his own music more precisely. “Finding similar points with my batchmates piqued their curiosity,” he said. Suddenly his world wasn’t divided between “people who understood Carnatic music” and “people who didn’t.” It was full of musicians who wanted to dig in with him.

And then came mentors who nudged open new doors. “TM Krishna and RK Shriramkumar reinstilled the fire in Carnatic music for me,” he said. Shriramkumar redefined exploration; TM is about pushing boundaries. They’ve both been experimental in their own way.” If tradition were a house, most people live in whichever room they inherit. Aditya speaks like someone who has opened every window, knocked down a few walls and occasionally built new staircases just to see what happens.

Improvisation, Friendship, And The Perpetual Push

Aditya Prakash (Image courtesy Sushma Soma)

Jazz asks for freedom; Carnatic asks for discipline. It sounds like a creative tug-of-war until Aditya shrugged lightly and said, “What may be freeing for me may be limiting for another musician.” To him, improvisation is a conversation about boundaries. “It’s about negotiating the playing field,” he said. “Every time I am comfortable, it’s time to start questioning.”

The Ensemble (his longtime collaborators and college friends) are part safety net, part provocation. They are the people who remind him there is always more to attempt, more to fail at, more to learn. He showcased ROOM-i-Nation (his solo gig-theatre piece, pronounced as "rumination") in Mumbai recently. “It was great to play to a largely Indian audience instead of the diaspora audience I’m used to,” he said.

When the show travels to Bengaluru on January 16, 2025 at Hubba at The Sabha, he expects the emotional temperature to shift, but only slightly... it’s the nature of cities, he said. Mumbai listened with curiosity at LitLive in NCPA, Bengaluru listens with intensity. Varanasi is where he’ll be performing Kabir songs with his Ensemble on December 21, 2025 at the Mahindra Kabira Festival. A different kind of listening entirely.

Hamlet, Akram Khan And Riz Ahmed

Working on two scores for Akram Khan, Aditya is deep in what he calls “sculpting sound.” He describes the process like a physicist describing matter turning into energy. “It’s about exploring the space where noise becomes music and music becomes noise,” he said. The beauty of this statement is that it’s not metaphorical. He literally sits with noise (breaths, footsteps, atmospheric hum) and experiments with how it blends into melody. There is no rigidity here, no classical puritanism.

This reimagining of Hamlet (a South Asian interpretation directed by Aneil Karia and starring Riz Ahmed) required him to compose the Shakespearan story's famous wedding scene that begins jubilantly and then spirals into darkness. “It was a fun challenge,” he said, as though this emotional tightrope were a perfectly normal afternoon puzzle. “I’ve always seen my music as a visual experience,” he adds. Which makes sense; his soundscapes often feel like rooms you walk into.

The Question That Changed Everything

Many diaspora artists spend their careers obsessing over whom they’re performing for: heritage communities, western audiences, or themselves. Aditya admits he asked this question for years, sometimes with anxiety.

“There was a time I wanted to be accepted and bring Carnatic music to global audiences,” he said. But the pandemic cracked something open. “Now I’m creating music for myself. The more specificity in your work, the more universality it brings.” This is the kind of thing only someone who has lived through artistic shapeshifting can say with conviction.

Aditya speaks about his sister, classical danseuse and choreographer Mythili Prakash, with the affectionate exasperation reserved for siblings who both inspire and challenge you. “She helped me investigate: Who am I making this music for?” he said. “Was part of employing drums or violins, or playing with a jazz band about being accepted by the West?” It’s a hard question. Harder still when it comes from family. But it seems to have unlocked a deeper honesty in his work.

The pandemic album ISOLASHUN (pronounced as "isolation) is one of his most emotionally naked works: genre-fluid, jagged, intimate. He describes the period as “the most revealing time of my life.” Alone with himself, he confronted both the desire to escape and the desire to discover. “It shifted the way I made music,” he said simply. And you can hear it: tracks that feel like sonic fractures slowly mending.

What Is Home For A Perpetual Traveller?

“Home is not really a place anymore,” he said. “It’s a routine: nature, slow mornings, silence, a good cup of coffee.” He travels with his own coffee beans, weighing scale and all. It is one of the few rituals that anchors him. You get an endearing image of an itinerant artist carrying a tiny, personal sanctuary in a pouch.

Ask him whether Carnatic music is at a turning point and he doesn’t hesitate. “The structures of hierarchy are being questioned,” he said. “Old structures are crumbling. There’s so much new building happening.” He speaks like someone witnessing a revolution from both inside and outside: a participant and a documentarian.

Aditya Prakash is a Carnatic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles (Image courtesy the artiste)

His voice is a force of nature and carries a backstory of discipline, rebellion, injury and recovery. “My dad used to pour cold water on my face if I didn’t wake up at 5 am to practice,” he laughs. Years of intense sadhana built a foundation strong enough to withstand the rough edges of adolescence. He admits he used his voice improperly for a period and developed nodules, which taught him caution. Now there is meditation, clean eating, yoga, and stress-management. The voice is an instrument, but also a biography.

What Comes Next?

A new album in 2026. A multidisciplinary show rooted in grief, based on Sushma Soma’s The Mountain Has The Last Say, which explores grief and healing through music. More composing, more questioning, more boundaries to blur.

Talking to Aditya Prakash leaves you with a peculiar feeling: the sense that you’ve just met someone who is both insider and outsider, traditionalist and rebel, scholar and wanderer. A musician not defined by geography but by curiosity. Some artists inherit a tradition. Aditya Prakash is busy reinventing one.

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