Santiago Jimenez was born into music. In Cuba, his father was a classical percussionist, his mother a contrabass player, his grandfather a composer and his grandmother a pianist. With three musicians for brothers, Santiago touched a piano first as a four-year-old with his grandmother. By six he was enrolled in music school for classical violin and piano, and grew up to become a professional violinist for chamber orchestras in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.
Fifteen years ago, he joined Mynta, a world music band formed by Swedish musicians in collaboration with India’s tabla-player Fazal Qureshi and singer Shankar Mahadevan. With Mynta, Santiago created eight albums, and toured the world several times over for 400 concerts. Now in Kochi for a year’s creative break, Santiago says every moment of his Indian experience has been an enriching one.
Santiago’s arrival in the city is credit to his partner, Swedish flautist Jessica Hugoson. Trained in France, Denmark and Sweden, Jessica was working at a jazz conservatory in Sweden when she saw a tiny ad calling for music teachers at Amadeus Academy of Music and Fine Arts, in Kochi, India. “Week after week, I’d see this paper on the notice board and after a month, I took it off, contacted Simi Koshy, the Academy’s director, and here we are!” says Jessica.
A month into their stay here, Santiago and Jessica have been busy settling their children into a school here and adjusting to a new culture. “One of India’s biggest attractions for us, as musicians, was its own diverse music traditions. We’re now in a place where we’re surrounded by different kinds of music all the time. It’s good for your ear to hear different sounds. It inspires you to write music in ways we haven’t explored before,” says Santiago, who speaks little English but was translated in this interview by Jessica.
Through their year here, the couple hope to produce an album written by them, and performed in collaboration with other Indian musicians. They therefore spend their mornings, while the children are at school, improvising with their instruments and writing new work. “I call our time here ‘white time’. In Sweden, we’re on a tight schedule always and even if we plan to be creative, from say three-to-four every afternoon, it doesn’t work like that. That’s the freedom we have here now,” says Jessica.
The later half of their day is spent interacting with the students at the Academy. While Jessica works on the children’s singing skills, Santiago accompanies several of the young pianists on the violin, besides teaching them the finer points of dynamics and performance technique from his experience as a jazz pianist. “It’s important for music teachers to also be performers. If they just teach, they grow unaware of trends and changes in the music industry and eventually, their teaching material too grows stale,” says Jessica.
Of working with the Trinity College of London syllabus with its annual Grade examinations, Jessica says, the system gives singers targets to work toward which provides a structure to their learning. She adds, “The only real difference between incredible musicians, and average ones, is practice. So when you start young, you get to invest your whole childhood and push your body to limits you wouldn’t be able to when you’re older.” Decades of rehearsal have made their instruments deeply personal extensions of their body, believe the couple. “Quality music has to go beneath the surface. It has to have a heart and a spirit which you can reach toward only when you really love music, and it becomes your best friend,” says Jessica.
For Santiago, the greatest plus from his Indian experience has been experiments with rhythm. Through his collaborations with Ustad Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain and Fazal Qureshi, Santiago says he has found much common ground between Cuban music, with its rich background of varied rhythms, and India’s percussion traditions. With the students in class too, Santiago often changes the entire touch of a piece by just imparting its feel. He teaches through played demonstrations and actions. He says, “Music has no language really. It’s about expressing what’s natural to you. When you have the will to communicate something, music can be your body’s language.”
The Indian connection
Santiago Jimenez has played the violin for Mynta, a world music group, for 15 years. Mynta was founded in 1979 as a jazz band but grew toward fusion in 1987 when they met tabla-player Fazal Qureshi and singer Shankar Mahadevan. The band now plays a blend of Nordic music and Indian classical music. Swedish musicians Santiago, Max Ahman (guitar), Christian Paulin (bass) and Sebastian Printz-Werner (percussion) lend the Nordic touch, while Dallas Smith from Nevada plays Indian flute and clarinet with Fazal and Shankar. Santiago’s role in the band ranges from arranging compositions to writing fresh music for them. With over 400 concerts world-over, Mynta has toured India consistently from 1987, resulting in eight albums. The band plans to tour India again in January 2014.
