Sunny Jain on his Ennio Morricone, "Wild Wild East" and his fatherExBulletin

On his first solo album, Red Baraat conductor Sunny Jain combines western spaghetti, hip-hop and Bollywood soundtracks and celebrates the migration of his late father from India to the United States .

Ebru Yildiz / Courtesy of the artist

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Ebru Yildiz / Courtesy of the artist

On his first solo album, Red Baraat conductor Sunny Jain combines western spaghetti, hip-hop and Bollywood soundtracks and celebrates the migration of his late father from India to the United States .

Ebru Yildiz / Courtesy of the artist

Inspiration can strike anywhere. For Sunny Jain, inspiration for his new album Wild wild east came while he was on stage at a concert at the Global Village in Dubai, which he describes as "much like the Epcot center of the Middle East."

Like the famous Disney World destination, the Global Village has representations of diverse nations and cultures. Most countries were represented by the architecture of Turkey by Byzantine and Ottoman art, France by the Eiffel Tower but the United States was represented by one person: a massive statue of a white male cowboy, rifle in a holster.

"I sat there like, sacred cow, [thinking] about this account of the cowboy and how he continues to persist as an American identity," recalls Jain. At that time, he decided that instead of fighting the story of the American cowboy, he was going to develop it.

Sure Wild wild east, Jain draws heavily on spaghetti westerns, but also hip-hop and Bollywood songs that his immigrant parents brought with them from India, combining all these familiar parts into something completely new. The album is also a celebration of his father, who died in November while Jain was putting the finishing touches on the album.

Ari Shapiro of NPR spoke to Sunny Jain about the story behind the album, reworking the techniques of film composer Ennio Morricone and writing music inspired by his father while the health of his father was declining. Listen to the reader above and read on for a transcript of their conversation.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Ari Shapiro: This album opens with a kind of opening which seems to me to be the theme song of a Bollywood cowboy film. This track is called "Immigrant Warrior". What do you have in mind here?

Sunny Jain: I was thinking of the trip my parents took: specifically my father going through one of the largest mass migrations in the history of the world in 1947 with the partition and independence of India and Pakistan; moving east from the Punjab, then finally to America and with that courage and confidence with which he crossed the world. Then the song plunges where it enters America. It is a mystery and he is trying to understand where his foot is here, his foundation.

You are above all a drummer, and on this album you use your instrument to imitate the sound of galloping hooves or of a thundering train on a track. Can you explain to us how you do this with your instruments?

I'm thinking of Ennio Morricone and his use of the snare drum. He wrote all of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns everyone knows about Clint Eastwood's movies like A handful of dollars and The good the bad and the ugly and had a way to just create this cinematic landscape with the drums. So I use it with a little snare, but I really use this punjabi drum called the dhol.

Describe what dhol looks like for us.

The dhol is a large barrel-shaped instrument. It hangs from the shoulder, and there is a high side, a treble side and a low side. It’s a little synonymous with Punjabi culture in the sense that it’s festive, it’s joyful, it’s related to Bhangra music and Bhangra dance, and folk music . So I use this in a galloping sense. "Wild Wild East" is a good one [example].

What are you trying to create here with dhol?

I am trying to create a forward momentum, traveling through the desert; I am thinking of the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. I'm trying to create a sense of urgency, I'm trying to replace the kind of patterns that Ennio was using that seem almost native American or like native aboriginal calls and replacing them with the punjabi, by Indian calls, by punjabi rhythms played by the saxophone, Punjabi dhol.

One of my favorite songs on the album is a song whose title translates into English as "My Heart Is A Vagabond". I can imagine a cowgirl singing this while the sun is setting on the plains, but it's actually an old Hindi song, right?

It is. One of the things we talked about about Gray McMurray on guitar here and it's Ganavya on vocals brought out that kind of bluesy and country infection that you hear in westerns across guitars. But you certainly hear the weakening of Ganavya's voice, with inflections of carnatic music.

Am I right to say that your father sang this song to your mother?

Yeah. There are two Bollywood songs here: "Aye Mere Dil Kahin Aur Chal" and "Hai Apna Dil to Aawara". My father, he was an amateur musician in the sense that he was passionate, and loved to sing and play Bollywood songs on his spool and he had a harmonium and a bulbul tarang, which is like an Indian banjo. He would take it off and he had a repertoire of four or five songs. Two of these songs were these two songs from the album.

I understand that your father passed away at the end of last year while you were finishing this album. Is it correct?

He did. He died on November 14. He was in poor health in April, and that was around the time I was rehearsing all the music. We entered the studio in May, and it was a four, five month process of its eventual decline. I played music to him in the hospital and in rehab, and it was nice to be able to play the stuff for him. There is a small extract from "Aye Mere Dil Kahin Aur Chal" on his real tarang bulbul which he brought from India and who migrated here to the United States.

I know this whole project is sort of a tribute to him, on the journey he made so you could be born in the United States, grow up in Rochester, NY What would he think of this album now that it is finished in the world?

I think he would be delighted. It was interesting, after having recorded and with everything that was going on with my father, it was [had] two or three weeks that I could not even listen to this music; it was just too painful, it reminded me of what was going on, and I finally knew what was going to happen. And it took me a while to get back to it, but I'm glad we were able to make this album and he could hear part of it.