Phoenix Rise Story

When Sunny Jain could no longer leave home, he found new ways to encounter people and the world. Stuck in lockdown for Covid–19 in March 2020 and unable to tour, the drummer and composer wasn’t sure how he’d fill the time and connect with others. He’d been on the road with his globally minded dance band Red Baraat for thirteen years, and the unexpected downtime gave him a chance to settle down, to decompress, to take stock and figure out what, exactly, he wanted to do. So he headed into the studio he’d just finished building in his New York basement and started playing.

 What Jain has emerged with a year later is unlike anything he’s done before, whether with Red Baraat or as a solo artist. In the solitude of his studio, Jain managed to build a transcontinental collective of over fifty artists, all of whom came together virtually to create a project of transcultural scope. Phoenix Riseis an album—ten songs, each of which began life as minute-long fragments Jain posted to his Instagram, and which he later expanded, adding additional guests and remixing and producing 8 of the tracks—but it’s also a vegan “planet based” cookbook with delicious, healthy recipes shared by the global mix of musicians. It’s also a collection of photos produced in collaboration with art director Louis Cuffari and photographer James Bartolozzi,that further highlights the connections between food, music, and community in a time of unshared space. 

The artists who appear here range from well-known jazz musicians (Vijay Iyer, Snarky Puppy’s Michael League) and brilliant session players (Darius Christian, Bubby Lewis, Dave “Smoota” Smith) to jam band darling Joe Russo and vocalists, violinists, dancers, and more. Each is foregoing their royalties to benefit the Center for Constitutional Rights. “As a child of immigrants, I appreciate the organization’s work challenging abusive immigration policies and supporting families and communities of color,” says Jain. “Their work also extends beyond the U.S., including a fight for LGBTQIA+ rights and gender justice across the globe. Combatting unjust laws and discriminatory treatment of transgender and gender-nonconforming people is not just an important cause for me personally, but an abhorrent violation of human rights that we should collectively work to end.” Taken together, the project represents a blueprint for how to imagine a community at a time when community seems most unimaginable.

 The songs here begin with the beat. Jain would set up his drums or pick up his dhol and start improvising, recording everything and emailing the highlights to close collaborators, good friends, and musicians he’d always admired but had never had a chance to work with. “I didn’t want to send a track and dictate anything,” he says. “Instead, I’d send it off to three or four people and say, ‘What do you think?’” In their additions and modifications, songs began to take shape, their scattered provenance resulting in a difficult-to-classify sound that sometimes feels rooted in the deep-heated jazz of Bitches Brew, and sometimes in frenetic garage rock, but mostly comes off as a multilingual conversation between deeply sensitive musicians. With a director on board providing visuals, Jain would post the videos to his Instagram, calling them “quarantets.” 

Just as Jain was preparing to share the song “Heroes,” an mbira-stippled rap tribute to the everyday workers holding the front line against Covid–19, George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin. Rather than put up a tip jar for themselves, Jain and the musicians—in this case, John Falsetto (Pfumojena), Malik Work, Tawanda Mapanda, and Endea Owens—decided to ask fans to donate to The Bail Fund. As an artist actively working across genre and national borders—and as a South Asian American—Jain has always been sensitive to issues of justice and ethics. As it did for so many, the killing of George Floyd spurred him to ask new questions about how he could put his convictions into action. With the pandemic bringing the scope of injustice to light, every new quarantet became a fundraiser for a different social justice organization. When it became clear that lockdown was resulting in higher instances of domestic and child abuse, they directed funds to Sakhi for South Asian Women. With the need for better gun control clearer than ever, they donated to Everytown for Gun Safety. In June, the song “Pride in Rhythm'' became a fundraiser for Black Trans Femmes in the Arts. 

That latter song is one of many Phoenix Risessongs that came together in an unusual way. “The whole track started with Chris Eddleton, the drummer in Red Baraat,” Jain says. “When we’re on the road, he’s always playing with his car keys—banging them back and forth and making dope rhythms on them.” Eddleton didn’t have a drumkit at home, so Jain had him record himself jangling his keys and built the song around that. Dancer Brinda Guha and mrudangam player Rajna Swaminathan created the rhythmic structure, while Vijay Iyer sent nearly a dozen synth and piano stems. Jain filled out the bottom end with his dhol.The resulting song is carried by a pizzicato sense of impending danger that sounds a bit like Dr. Dre, but it’s punched up and rolled around by the interlocking percussion. “Where is Home'' is sung by Shilpa Ananth, who was on tour in India when the lockdown began and found herself stuck in Dubai, unable to get back to the US. Her long, stretched vocal, punctuated by mbira and the emotional interplay between Jain’s dhol and Joe Russo’s drums, highlights the incredible poignance and strangeness the concept of “home” suddenly took on for so many people in 2020.

 Elsewhere, Jain revisits the Morricone-meets-A.R. Rahman sound of his album Wild Wild East, and sets Marc Cary’s keys (as in keyboards, not car), Lauren Sevian’s sax, and Grey Mcmurray’s guitar and vocals on a long, low simmer on the title track. Raaginder whips a gusty violin line around Arooj Aftab’s urdu vocals in “Say It” (complete lyrics: “Black lives matter, say it”), while Kushal Gaya swaggers over the twanging guitar of Black Pumas’ Adrian Quesada in “I’ll Make It Up To You.” Jain even enlists his wife, Sapana Shah, and their children, Kaiden and Monami Jain, for a joyful reprise of “Hai Apna Dil,” a classic Bollywood song Jain previously covered on his Smithsonian Folkways Recordings album.

Get together any group of people that crosses ethnic and national boundaries, and the conversation eventually turns to food. Each of the ten songs on Phoenix Riseis accompanied by recipes provided by the artists on the track. “Part of it was my own selfish tendency,” Jain laughs. Like everyone else, he’d found himself cooking constantly during quarantine, and he wanted some fresh recipes to try. With artists from Italy, Zimbabwe, the UK, and across the US involved, the recipes offer a way to venture into the world with a delicious, healthy meal at a time when sitting across the table from a new friend still seems out of reach. “Food and music have always been central in bringing people together,” Shah writes in the book’s foreword, and as a physician at a plant-based clinic, she’s seen firsthand what access to healthy food can mean for people’s health. “It’s about community,” Jain adds. “Especially communities of color that often times don’t have access to healthy food and are witnessing the effects of that on their health.” 

Food and music come together again in the stunning collection of photographs that accompany the text. Rather than simply cook and shoot the various meals, Jain and Cuffari take a more imaginative approach, pairing ingredients or cooking implements from each artist’s recipes with their instrument. Halved avocados rest among coffee beans, leaning against Jonathan Goldberger’s Gretsch guitar. Three fat chili pepper form a chord on Rachel Eckroth’s piano. The intimate framing of the images highlights the tactility of the food and the instruments, a subtle reminder of the intimacy that comes with making food and music. Guitars, mbiras, trombones, tomatoes, squash: each is among the raw ingredients of community.

Though it started as a way to kill time in lockdown, Phoenix Risehas become so much more than that. The project presents a holistic view of what it means to live responsibly, how to be a good citizen both of your neighborhood and of the world at large. Crucially, the sheer pleasure of the music—and the pleasures of the food—are a compelling reminder that these responsibilities can be a source of great fulfillment and even pleasure, that we can receive even as we give, that there is still, after everything we’ve seen, something good that happens when people take the risk of getting to know one another and themselves. It’s a strange cosmic twist that Phoenix Risecould only come together at a time when human beings could not. 

- Marty Sartini Garner