Indian-origin banker, musician Chandrika Tandon wins best New Age album Grammy

Indian-American musician Chandrika Tandon, 71, wins her first Grammy for Best New Age Album, celebrating music's power to spread joy and light.

Sunday night was celebration day for Indian-born American musician Chandrika Tandon.

Chandrika Tandon won the grammy in the Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album category for Triveni. (X/Chandrika Tandon)

At 71, she won her first Grammy — the award for Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album for Triveni, a collaborative effort also featuring the music of three-time Grammy-winning South African flautist Wouter Kellerman and Japanese-origin cellist Eru Matsumoto.

“Music is love, music is light… music is laughter and let’s all be surrounded by love, light, and laughter. Thank you for the music, and thank you to everyone who makes music,” Tandon said in her acceptance speech in Los Angeles on a glittering night when Beyonce (album of the year) and Kendrick Lamar (record of the year) walked with multiple awards .

“[This is] a moment that reminds me that music… ignites the light within all of us, and, even in our darkest days, music spreads joy and laughter,” Tandon later wrote on Instagram.

Tandon, Kellerman and Matsumoto beat out nominees that included Ricky Kej (for Break of Dawn) and Anoushka Shankar, for Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn.

While Kej has won three Grammys, this was Shankar’s 11th nomination. She has not yet won.

“We had such wonderful nominees in the category. The fact that we won this is really an extra special moment for us,” Tandon said, in a backstage interview with The Recording Academy, after the win.

Tandon is now an American, but was born in Chennai, to a banker (father Krishnamurthy) and a musician (mother Shantha Krishnamurthy). She studied at the Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad, and started her international career with Citibank in Lebanon.

She is, incidentally, the elder sister of former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi.

Tributes pour in Understandably, India is celebrating. Amid a flurry of headlines and tweets, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X: “Congratulations to @chandrikatandon…. We take great pride in her accomplishments as an entrepreneur, philanthropist and of course, music!”

Tandon is a trained vocalist in Carnatic and Hindustani classical music. She was nominated for a Grammy once before, in 2011, in the Contemporary World Music category, for her debut album Soul Call.

Triveni, which means the confluence of three, is meant to represent the diverse cultures of the three musicians on the album. Its seven tracks blend Vedic chants and meditative tones with world music.

In addition to her music, and indeed before it, Tandon served as a business leader and banker. She was the first Indian-American partner at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. In 1992, she founded the New York-based consultancy Tandon Capital Associates.

In 2015, she and her husband Ranjan Tandon, a hedge-fund founder, gifted $100 million to New York University’s School of Engineering, which is now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

In 2009, aged 55, she founded a not-for-profit music label, Soul Chants. She has released six albums since, including Soul March (2013), inspired by the principles of Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, featuring 75 classical Hindustani musicians and elements of Latin music and jazz; Soul Mantra (2014), with renditions of the chant Om Namah Shivaya in nine ragas; Shivoham: The Quest (2017), featuring tracks in Sanskrit and English; and Ammu’s Treasures, a three-volume collection inspired by her grandchildren.

India at the Grammys The late sitar maestro Ravi Shankar holds the record for most Grammys won by an Indian, with five, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. The late tabla maestro Zakir Hussain won four. Ricky Kej has won three.

Contemporary icon AR Rahman, legendary flutist Rakesh Chaurasia and record producer PA Deepak have won two each.

Those with one Grammy include the poet-lyricist Gulzar, singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan, instrumentalist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Shakti (the fusion band with John McLaughlin, L Shankar, Zakir Hussain and Vikku Vinayakram, among others), percussionist V Selvaganesh, composer Ganesh Rajagopalan, the late audio engineer H Sridhar, and singer-songwriter Tanvi Shah.

Conductor Zubin Mehta has been nominated 18 times, the most for any Indian. He has not yet won.

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