Sultans of String, Centennial Theatre, Friday, March 31 at 8 p.m. Tickets $28/$25/$21.
Classical, classical, Arabian music, classical and … Ravi?
In the tradition of future musicians, Chris McKhool was sifting through his parents’ record collection when he came upon the man who brought ragas to the world: sitar player Ravi Shankar.
There were two songs on the record and no place for a third, but it was all McKhool needed.
It was the sound.
Ravi Shankar once said music was the quickest way to reach God. Playing that record, McKhool was trying to reach Shankar.
“I played it so much it came out like a Slinky,” the singer and violinist recalls.
His love of sitar stayed with him like a latent talent through a childhood in which neighbourhood kids beat a path to his house to take piano lessons from his mother (“a formidable musician,” McKhool assures me).
“I was probably able sing a scale before I could say a sentence,” McKhool remarks.
He recalls the day his mother asked him what instrument he’d like to play, noting that her question was fundamentally different from: “Would you like to play an instrument?”
There was classical training, youth symphonies, the first guitar, first time writing a song, and eventually forming what McKhool calls: “the ultimate crossover act.”
The Sultans of String play East Coast Celtic music, Cuban beats, rhumba flourishes.
“All of this music is the folk music of different countries,” McKhool explains.
The Arabic rhythms come from McKhool’s own ancestry, he says, pointing out that, traditionally speaking, his name isn’t pronounced Mac-Cool but Mik-hool – with an emphasis on the ‘h.’
But even with all those influences, McKhool is always listening for the next thing.
It was about 2011 when McKhool was playing a corporate gig and came across Anwar Khurshid.
He was sitting cross-legged with a giant sitar on his lap.
It was the sound.
McKhool knew they should play together – in about five years.
“We did the whole Toronto musician thing which is to trade numbers and say: ‘Yeah, why don’t we jam someday?’”
When someday finally arrived it was “like spiritual therapy,” McKhool recalls.
“No phones, no buzzers, no computers. Just letting the tape roll and making music up together.”
They’d play on one riff “for like 47 minutes” and then play something else for a really long time.
McKhool sensed this could be something more than a spiritual jam. This could be the next thing.
Like all jazz cats, McKhool has an almost pathological aversion to repetition. You can hear his love of jazz in his playing and in the way he pronounces Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. He calls them DjangoReinhardt and StephaneGrappelli, saying it all in one breath, the way a gun nut pronounces SmithenWesson.
Sultans of String had brought invited different players into their sound but they opted to treat Khurshid like one of the band, creating what McKhool calls a “musical love child.”
“It’s something that he could not do on his own and it’s something that we could not do on our own,” he says. “The challenge was taking those ideas and condensing them into four-minute pop song form so we could put it on an album and make it accessible to western audiences.”
The result was Subcontinental Drift, a Juno-nominated release with four tracks featuring Khurshid, including a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind.”
The band liked the song so much they included on a vinyl release celebrating the band’s first 10 years.
“It really amazed me that a song could be so well-written that it could survive half a century and pass through all language and cultural and musical and geographic barriers,” McKhool says.
