Chennai-Based Rock Band Jatayu Is Taking South Indian Carnatic Ideas Into A Contemporary, Global Space
Some bands chase hooks; Jatayu seems to chase universes. The foursome gets candid ahead of their performance at Echoes of Earth eco-centric music festival.
Published : December 8, 2025 at 2:21 PM IST
There’s always a moment when listening to Jatayu, where you realise you’ve forgotten to be clever about it. You stop analysing the way a raga curls itself around a bassline, or how the guitars seem to negotiate their boundaries like two old friends haggling over a shared plate of fries. You simply give in. It happens halfway through their track The Mirage; it happens at the end of their latest album Jewel Tones; it happens whenever they decide, collectively, to leap off the edge of a groove and trust they’ll land somewhere interesting.
As they prepare to play at the sustainability-forward Echoes of Earth festival in Bengaluru this weekend, there’s a sense that the band is both arriving at something and returning to where they started. Jatayu (four musicians from Chennai who play rock and jazz with Carnatic bones) have never seemed in a hurry to belong anywhere in particular. Which is ironic, because across India’s increasingly crowded indie landscape, they’ve carved out their own peculiar niche without ever making a fuss about it. The line-up is equal parts improbable and inevitable: bandleader and guitarist Sahib Singh, guitarist-percussionist Shylu Ravindran, bassist Kashyap Jaishankar, and vocalist-drummer Manu Krishna. Together, they sound like a city slightly out of breath and deliriously alive.
Here’s what happens when they talk about their music: it becomes a map of Chennai, of sound, of the strange places imagination can take you when you aren’t trying to prove anything.
On Playing Echoes of Earth
Music festivals love their buzzwords. “Eco-forward”, “circularity”, “future-positive”... the whole glossary of good intentions. But Jatayu’s bassist Kashyap has the gift of making sustainability sound like something you actually live, not a hashtag. “Sustainability is not easy,” he says plainly. “Not a lot of it is convenient.” Which is the sort of line that would depress most PR teams, but Kashyap isn’t in the business of selling anything.
He’s talking about touring: lugging equipment across cities, figuring out where to eat, what not to throw away, and how to avoid being the band that leaves a trail of plastic cups behind them. “We carry our own bottles, travel mugs, tote bags. We try to minimise what we throw away, recycle at home, repurpose things. You do what you can.”
There’s something comforting about this pragmatic ecological philosophy. No lofty declarations. Just four musicians trying not to be terrible humans. And perhaps that’s why Echoes of Earth (a festival built on reimagined stages, recycled materials, and an almost pastoral charm) feels like a fitting home for their sound. At Echoes, stages appear like natural formations: structures rising out of the earth as if they were grown rather than built. It’s the opposite of a rock venue, where the stage is often a barricade between artists and audience. The band thrives on this. Kashyap calls their music “storytelling without lyrics.”
“We thrive on spontaneity,” Kashyap explains to ETV Bharat. “We let the stage, the audience, the environment push the music in new directions. Nature doesn’t have a plan... it exists and adapts. We draw inspiration from that.” This is, in essence, the Jatayu method: structure is a suggestion, mood is a compass, improvisation is a survival tactic. At a festival that worships the outdoors, they feel a bit like migratory birds who’ve found the right branch to perch on.
Sound Goes From Lab Experiment To Language
Manu, the band’s vocalist and drummer, remembers the early days as a kind of joyful chaos. “Jatayu felt like a music laboratory,” he says. “Ragas met rock and jazz energy in an unpolished way. Sometimes instinctive, sometimes chaotic.”
It’s a description that feels familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a practice room with musicians under thirty. But something happened along the way; a moment where experimentation turned into something more fluent. “The sound settled into its own language,” Manu explains. “Now it isn’t genres trying to meet. It’s one voice that grew out of all those influences. We moved from experimenting to expressing.”
This distinction (experimenting vs expressing) is perhaps the most honest summary of their evolution. The raga remains, the groove remains, but there’s a maturity, a clarity, a willingness to let silence do some of the work.
On India's Indie Scene
Indian independent music is a bit like a teenager: ambitious, excitable, and still figuring out its relationship with its parents. Jatayu, by contrast, feels like musicians who have accepted the family drama and found a way to live with it.
“We’re not here to claim we’re the first at anything,” Manu insists. “We’re part of a newer wave taking South Indian Carnatic ideas into a contemporary space. The music feels local, but it reads globally.”
It’s true. Indian fusion has always had a complicated identity: beloved abroad, underappreciated at home. Yet here they are, at Echoes of Earth, one of the country’s biggest independent festivals, playing music that refuses to pick a lane.
Chennai: The City That Made Them
Three members of the band grew up in Chennai. The fourth, Manu, adopted it. Guitarist and percussionist Shylu talks about the city with the kind of affectionate exasperation reserved for childhood friends and unreliable public transport. “We carry the sound of Tamil Nadu with us,” says Shylu. “Carnatic sabhas, temple music, Ilaiyaraaja’s raga-first approach, the gospel and Western influences... it’s all in the bloodstream.” Listen to their tracks and you hear it: a Chennai that is both devotional and rebellious, ancient and electric. It’s a city with calluses and poetry. A city that wants to argue with you but will also feed you before you go home.
Some bands chase hooks; Jatayu seems to chase universes.
Sahib, the calm centre of the group’s controlled storm, talks about composition the way a novelist talks about world-building. “Our music is concept-driven,” he says. “The way we write and arrange our music is already rooted in world-building. If you look at our first EP Chango Tales and our latest release Jewel Tones, both are concept-driven — each track is part of a larger universe we imagine before composing. Storytelling drives us.” It’s easy to imagine them writing film scores; particularly the kind where a lone protagonist stares out at a dystopian skyline and wonders where all the auto-rickshaws went. “A sci-fi or post-apocalyptic world would be amazing to interpret sonically,” Sahib adds.
Future Plans
If you want to know where Jatayu is headed, listen to Shylu talk about ragas. His excitement is almost boyish, like someone describing a new puzzle he can’t wait to take apart. “One of our new ideas is a lullaby starting in Nilambari and moving into Varali,” he says. “From gentle to darker.” It’s such an unusual, strangely perfect description of the band’s journey: begin in comfort, wander into unease, return with something valuable. For vocals, they imagine a sound reminiscent of TM Krishna: emotion-forward, unafraid, resonant. It’s an aspiration, Shylu admits, but one that feels absolutely within reach.
2026, by all accounts, is going to be busy. A new EP. A music video that ties the album together. A documentary called Road to Fuji Rock, chronicling their journey from Chennai to Japan. Collaborations across continents. More touring, which means more tote bags, reusable mugs, and polite arguments about who forgot the water bottles this time. Sahib says: “Lots of exciting things in motion.”
Jatayu's story is not a grand arc. It’s a series of small, thoughtful decisions (musical, environmental, emotional) that add up to something unmistakably their own. At Echoes of Earth this Saturday, they will step onto a stage built from reclaimed materials, surrounded by trees, witnessed by a crowd that has come ready to listen. When they begin, you’ll likely forget to be clever. You’ll simply give in.
Jatayu will play at Echoes of Earth on Saturday, December 13, 2025 at Embassy Riding School in Bengaluru. Tickets are available on District By Zomato.
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