Raga

So, Johnny,

what do you sing? We're Sikhs, and all the scriptures that we have are written in Raag, in musical scale.

So, therefore, singing is the most thing to do.

Lots of singing, and we sing in the morning.

But a 23rd September, 2026 essay from Scroll approaches his final years from a completely different direction.

A writer raised on Indian classical music notices how Coltrane began trading complex Western harmony for the strict mathematical rules of a traditional Raag.

The question here is what drove that late career shift.

It asks what Coltrane was actually trying to achieve by studying those ancient scales and what he might have composed if he had lived long enough to master them.

He told Nat Hentoff he had been studying approaches to music, as in India, where particular sounds and scales are meant to produce particular emotions.

In an interview published in 1963, he told Jean Clousey and Michel Delorme that he wished he could find a way to make it rain when he wanted, or play a song that would cure a sick friend or bring a broke one money, and admitted he did not know which pieces would do it or how to learn them.

The wish reminds me of the old stories of the great Mian Tansen singing Raag Deepak and setting the lamps alight and of Bhimsen Joshi singing Raag Megh Malhar to invoke the torrential Mumbai monsoon.

Coltrane was already permuting small groups of notes when he played with pianist Thelonious Monk in 1957 and Miles Davis described him taking five notes of a chord and turning them around to hear how many ways they could sound.

Of course.

Uh, both systems are built on the Raga, on the Raga system.

So very highly melodic in nature and, um, uh, yeah, just nuanced melodic systems.

But with Hindustani, um, I found this really amazing freedom to express within the language of notes because it is highly improvised.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's like me sitting with like my acoustic guitar and, um, trying to create, um, Raga worlds inside of that space.

Oh, wow.

And I remember like, you know, for us as children, when I say us, I'm talking about myself and my brother, my older brother, Gurudev Singh, who plays tabla as well and very often accompanies me.

So we would go to the Gurudwara, we would listen to the music, not understand the language, the Gurbani language, you know, we wouldn't understand what Raag was.

And our parents wanted us to learn, like I said, so they sent us to many kind of local teachers here in Birmingham.

We didn't take to it too well.

We also have Gurbani from the writing of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, which is Dasam Granth.

And we have other spiritual scripts as well, such as Bhai Gurdas Ji's Vars.

When we sing this, you know, we say if we're just playing a melody, a Raag, based on a Raag, based on a Taal, we call that a Gath.

Right.

It's exactly.

Specifically, a section categorized as Raag Bilaval, 847.

Yeah.

Now, before we even get into the intense poetry here, we need to translate that title.

Like, what does it actually mean to be reading a Raag?

Well, that's a crucial place to start because it sets the emotional stage for what you're about to experience.

In Indian classical music and Sikh scripture, a rag is a specific musical framework.

It would be a shame if-

Um, uh, Raga's gonna-

... something happened to her during the hunt.

[laughs] Raga's gonna come back and go, "I brought salad." [laughs]

[laughs]

'Cause, uh, she just foraged and-

[laughs] Some say I have the spirit of a bear.

And she wipes grease off of her mouth.

I love that bit.

Jobji Sahib sits outside of Raag and traditionally is recited rather than in a Raag performance.

What was, or why in terms of the YouTube video, was it put to a dark? And how did you decide how to match that musically? Some people would argue you're adding something that wasn't there in the original.

Why was it down?

There's some wild cards in there.

I think you could find something that you like, Raga.

Most definitely.

I think there's some TBR in there that you'd be like, okay.

is.

On those bad days in the city of Raga.

Where are you? Dad? Help! Help! Yeah.

It's almost like we need to create a computer game and there are these different options of like, what happens when you're feeling...

Notes.

And then the way we arrange it becomes a Raga.

And each Raga is sung at a certain time of a day that invokes the kind of grounding spirituality that we have.

So this Raga is... early morning that sets the tone for the rest of the day it's called Rag Bhairav and it has these strange two of the notes are not in the usual way they go flat so they're ghost notes in the song and the way that I sing it will immediately tell the audience that oh she's singing Rag Bhairav and for that to then change into first the English part and then into a reggae part that was so hard in this song

Interesting.

The record,