The Days of Saffron Soul
For the better part of the first half of this decade, I was proud to be a part of an event called Saffron Soul. Saffron Soul was a regular DJ event (with the occasional live performance) that focused on "downtempo music from the other hemispheres". Basically this meant chillout and lounge music with world music influences. Of course the regular SS attendee knew that I was actually more of a Latin Soul Jazz fan and my DJ'ing tendencies usually brought the dance-floor moving and bodies shaking by the night's end.I needed someone to bring the Indian beats, so I recruited Philadelphia's DJ Luxe (who also designed the beautiful fliers). I used to chuckle when people would come up and talk to me about the great "indian" sounds they were hearing and they would look up at the DJ booth and see a skinny white dude. But i was definitely down with what Geoff (DJ Luxe) was spinning and even wrote a track called dylangee to segue into his set. At the time, SS was at Paisley, one of the first South Asian themed lounges in NYC. To add to the ambience we brought in my good friend and fellow Sonic Soulster Ricardo Rivera to do some incredible video projections.
The most exciting part of doing Saffron Soul was that it gave me a venue to play out some of tracks I was working on. Vinod is the Man on Third Ave. is a work that was created as another segue into one of Geoff's sets or as a track Geoff could include in one of his own sets. Unfortunately, Geoff couldn't make the trip from Philly to NYC all the time so I decided to bring in my good friend Aaron Halley aka North Guinea Hills. Aaron is a master of mixing up styles and genres into his own unique blend. In retrospect he also inserted a little more of the african sound to SS. The final addition to the Saffron Soul lineup was my longtime cohort, DJ Graham S. By the time Graham moved to NYC we had moved the Saffron Soul night to the much loved (and now sorely missed) openair bar. Graham's sets were his usual brand of broken beat, impossibly-difficult-to-mix house music. It played in well with my old school Latin Soul Jazz sets and kept the hips swinging. Finally, after several years of merry making, Saffron Soul came to it's conclusion when the openair bar fell under new ownership - ownership that liked to not pay their DJ's and also blame them for the graffiti in the bathroom. And now openair is the back of a Belgian beer bar. I guess the new owners were pretty successful. Well, we had a good run and a lot of fun was had.
Snap, Crackle, Pop
I put together a mix CD entitled Snap, Crackle, Pop a little while ago to promote my DJ sets. The title is a reference to the fact that all the tracks are mixed from vinyl - very old vinyl to be specific. I'm not going to post up the entire tracklist here but it's a pretty good example of a typical K. Ravi DJ set - Latin Soul Jazz mixed with global downtempo beats. Included are some of my favorites: Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, and Sergio Mendes. It's a big mp3 file (about an hour long) so take a listen and enjoy a nice respite from your day.
his majesty. . . is a track that was included on a promo CD of original tracks that I had put together around the same time as Snap, Crackle, Pop. Some of the tracks ended up on So Salty which I should note is available for download through emusic. This track has only a few samples and includes much of my own playing and sequencing on it. The vocal sample is from Billy Cox who is commenting on the true King of Rock, Jimi Hendrix. The promo CD that this appeared on was called "what happened to chilling out. . . ." and garnered some positive feedback from none other than Mixmaster Morris (aka The Irresistible Force) who also gave So Salty much love. I am still quite honored by that fact.
Getting the Ball Rolling. . . .
The focus of this website will be to serve as an archive of a bunch of the recordings I have made over the years. Some will be old and some will be new. Some may have appeared elsewhere or even officially released. There is no order to this I'll just post stuff as I rediscover it. However, I will try and include any background information that may be interesting pertaining to every track I post. So in honor of the 2006 World Cup which I've definitely been checking out, lets get the ball rolling. . . .
Solitaire Eve is a collaboration between Asoka (now known as William Fields). Both of us being Sonic Soul members a collaboration seemed to be a logical step. Recorded on a Saturday Morning sometime in 1999 I had a gig in Philly that night and stopped by in the morning in Delaware to jam with Bill. The way I remember it I think Bill just played a pulsing beat (definitely not what's on the final recording) and I repeatedly looped parts over top of it. All the sounds are guitar except for the beats. The funny thing is that 2 of my strings were broken and I had no spares. Nonetheless, the song was one of the most downloaded songs on mp3.com that year.
wallpaper is not really a title, it's more of a description. This is pretty indicative of my process of writing when I'm sitting alone on the guitar or piano. The whole thing is improvised (or as Zappa would call it "instantaneously composed") - all done in one take and recorded using the built in mic on my laptop. I played the piano and looped it using my BOSS loop pedal (still figuring that thing out) and then picked up the acoustic guitar and sang a little at the same time. It's really short. Maybe it will become something larger later on. I think this was recorded sometime near the end of 2005.
K. Ravi Internet Node ca. 2006
Welcome to the K. Ravi website. This site will be very different from previous kravi.com incarnations. The main difference is that there will be many updates. Not merely statistical updates (when's, where's, etc.) but updates that will feature lots of content. The content will mostly be musical but there will also be lots of words like the ones I am typing right now. I will try and keep this from turning into a blog by spewing useless inanities, but hey - this is a website about me after all. So take a look around and please feel free to let me know what you think by dropping me an email. Thanks for stopping by!