INTERVIEW | Inside The Moment Indian-American Artist Charu Suri Discovered Her Albums Earned Two 2026 Grammy Nominations

Indian-American artist Charu Suri’s most still, inward-looking album has arrived at one of the loudest intersections in global music: the Grammy Awards. Shayan (an album built for night-time listening, low lights, and the gentle lowering of the nervous system) has been nominated in the Contemporary Instrumental Album category at the 68th Grammys. It is her first non-jazz record. It is also, in its own way, the most radical thing she has done.

Which is saying something, because this is a composer who has already made history as the first Indian-born jazz composer to present original work at Carnegie Hall. A musician who began piano lessons at five, travelled across four continents, collaborated with giants like John Patitucci and Steve Gadd, and redrew the borders between Indian ragas, jazz improvisation, and Western classical form through her ambitious Book of Ragas series. Charu Suri is not someone who lacks movement in her life. If anything, she has had too much of it. That excess of motion (airports, hotels, stages, applause, encores) is where Shayan began.

The Night The News Arrived

The Grammy nomination itself arrived in a manner befitting modern musicianship: fragmented, multi-screened, and emotionally confusing. There were four simultaneous telecasts that day. Suri was attending a viewing party for one album that didn’t get nominated. She was in a studio, watching the announcements roll in live, when Sounds of Kumbha (another project she worked on as a producer) was nominated.

“I was jumping for joy,” she recalls. Then came the texts. Congratulations messages. Enough of them to suggest that something else had happened. “It wasn’t until my team informed me that Shayan was nominated,” she says. “I had tears in my eyes.” As if the universe was making a point about abundance, a children's education album she’d worked on (HerStory by Flor Bromley) was also nominated. There was another detail: she was the only female nominee in her category, and the only female producer on Sounds of Kumbha.

Suri has recently been elected governor of the Recording Academy’s New York chapter, a role that gives her a clear vantage point on gender representation in music. “I see less representation of women in jazz,” she says over a Zoom call from her home in the US. “But I’ve been happy to see more female leaders.”

It’s tempting to frame moments like this as victories, but Suri resists the narrative arc. Duke Ellington’s old line: “There are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music” comes up early in the conversation. It’s her way of stepping sideways out of categories, awards, and market-friendly descriptors. Shayan, she insists, is not a “new age” album.

Burnout, Silence, and the Refusal to Perform

If jazz thrives on motion, Shayan was born from exhaustion. It is part of Universal Music India’s wellness-focused label called Vedam Records. For three years, Suri toured relentlessly. City after city. Audience after audience. On the surface, it was all working: appreciation, acclaim, packed rooms. Inside, something else was happening. “I was emotionally burnt out,” she says. “Chronically sleep deprived.” Anyone who has ever lived out of a suitcase will recognise this moment; the one where your life looks enviable from the outside but feels uninhabitable from within. Add to this a period of global political turmoil, and the constant hum of the world begins to sound less like momentum and more like static.

Charu Suri is a virtuosic pianist (Image courtesy the artist)

Suri decided to slow down. She began studying evening ragas, forms traditionally associated with twilight, rest, and introspection. That is when she started writing Shayan. “I don’t like to think of music as a formula or algorithm,” she says. The album was not conceived to fit a playlist or a market niche. It emerged, she says, out of necessity. A need to “go deep into my inner core.”

The first track she wrote was Nightingale. From there, the album assembled itself not through auditions or industry matchmaking, but through trust. Every collaborator on Shayan is someone she has performed or worked with before. People who know her music, and whom she knows in return. Jim Kimo West, for instance (a Grammy winner and long-time collaborator) features prominently. “Jim knows about ragas better than any non-Indian musician I have met,” she says. This matters, because Shayan is not about aesthetic borrowing but about understanding.

Improvisation, Reimagined

There’s an assumption (particularly among listeners raised on jazz) that stillness and improvisation are opposites. That control negates spontaneity. Shayan dismantles this idea. “It has an element of improvisation,” Suri explains. “I gave all the musicians a lead sheet like I do with jazz and asked them to improvise.” The difference is not the absence of freedom, but the quality of attention required. Improvising at high speed demands reflex. Improvising in stillness demands restraint. It asks musicians to listen not just to each other, but to the space between notes.

This is perhaps why the album feels less like a performance and more like a shared breathing exercise undertaken by some of the most accomplished musicians in the world. The ensemble includes Premik Russell Tubbs of the iconic group Mahavishnu Orchestra, vocalist Anita Lerche, dulcimer virtuoso Max ZT, cellist and Grammy nominee Tess Remy-Schumacher, among others. These are not players unfamiliar with virtuosity. The challenge here was something else entirely. “Listeners don’t realise the crazy amount of artistry it takes to deliver in this format,” Suri says. Playing intentionally, without filling every available moment is a different kind of mastery.

Her collaborators on Shayan (ETV Bharat)

A Record Written For One Person

For all its global ambition, Shayan began as something personal. “I didn’t write it to please or pander to anyone,” Suri says. “I wrote it for my mother.” Three years ago, she lost her father. Her mother, grieving and struggling with sleep, began relying on medication. Suri wanted to offer something else.

An album to help her rest. This detail changes how you hear the music. What might otherwise sound like aesthetic minimalism becomes an act of care. The decision to step away from her identity as a “virtuosic pianist” and simply be human feels like an ethical pivot.

“I have received numerous messages from people saying the one thing they spin before going to bed is Shayan,” she says. Imagine this unintended community of listeners, people scattered across geographies, lying in different rooms, pressing play for the same reason.

Suri is careful with language, particularly around the idea of “wellness music.” The term carries baggage: generic soundscapes, interchangeable textures, a kind of emotional neutrality masquerading as calm. “I wouldn’t call it a wellness or new age album,” she says firmly. “When you think of wellness music, they’re using Tibetan bowls or cymbals. This is orchestral.”

The depth comes from the ragas themselves—Kalyani, Desh for example—forms with centuries of emotional architecture embedded within them. Leaning into that depth, rather than skimming the surface for mood, is what keeps Shayan from becoming shallow. This is not background music. It asks for presence, even as it offers rest.

Holding The Centre

With so many producers involved (Siddhant Bhatia, Tess Remy-Schumacher, Devan Ekambaram, Raniero Palm Margee Minier Tubbs) the risk of fragmentation was real. What holds Shayan together is history. “I’ve worked with all of them before,” Suri says. Tess, in particular, plays a crucial role not just as a featured cellist on four tracks, but as a unifying artistic force. “I couldn’t imagine Shayan without her,” says Suri. The album feels cohesive because it is built on relationships, not transactions. This is a recurring theme in Suri’s career: the long game, the slow accumulation of trust, the refusal to rush collaboration.

Asked how she would want Shayan to be remembered as a feeling Suri doesn’t hesitate: “Still and luminous.” One reviewer described it as “a cosmos of luminosity,” a phrase that captures the album’s paradox: expansive without being overwhelming. By the time it ends, she says, “your body feels like it’s gone on a journey.” It is not a frenzied one. There is no climax designed to impress. The celebration here is of stillness itself.

Shayan feels almost subversive. It is an album that does not ask for your attention so much as your permission: to slow down, to listen, to rest. That it has found itself recognised on one of the biggest stages in music is less a contradiction than a correction.

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