How a heart attack fuelled the fire in Nitin Sawhney

Nitin Sawhney’s signature blend of Southeast Asian ragas, dancefloor grooves and lush electronic soundscapes continues to win him standing ovations. Need proof? Lie on the floor and listen to this song – or check him out in Adelaide next month.

Nitin Sawhey plays at WOMADelaide in 2011 Picture: Rob Sferco

Nitin Sawhney dissolved into fractals on March 1, 2024. One moment he was asleep in bed in south London, dreaming of a world revelling in its common humanity, and the next he was in a speeding ambulance, floating, semi-euphoric, on a morphine drip, then under lights in a hospital operating room, his essence exploding, dividing and realigning.

The multi award-winning polymath – variously a composer, producer, musician, DJ, educator, Booker Prize judge, CBE and more – had been walloped by a heart attack, just days before he was due to fly to Australia to headline WOMADelaide. “Nitin Sawhney is unable to perform due to a medical emergency,” ran the official statement. “He is deeply saddened but hopes to be back in the future.”

Two stents, another operation, and the former triathlete has made a good recovery from an episode triggered, it turns out, by a genetic predisposition; heart problems run in his family. He transformed this traumatic experience into Heart Suite, a music composition with three movements, which he delivered alongside 13 of his songs – adventurous blends of genres including Indian, Spanish and classical, and soul, electronica and pop – with the Halle Orchestra in Manchester in December.

“It was so moving to hear it back with a big orchestra,” says Sawhney, 60, close-cropped and match fit in leather jacket and jeans in his recording studio near London’s Brixton tube station. “I needed a cathartic medium to express my feelings after what happened: the crushing weight on my chest, the blacking out and falling, the energy building as if lots of particles were forming to create something solid.”

Nitin Sawhney

The Halle had already commissioned Sawhney to write a piece on identity, the theme of his current album of the same name, which is prefaced on his website with “the only opinion that counts in defining who you are is your own”.

That he was given free rein to pivot from the original brief is testament to the astounding body of work he has built over three decades, from scoring films and TV series including BBC’s Blue Planet and the forthcoming, much hyped Surviving Earth to creating more than 20 studio albums, producing for the likes of Sting, Paul McCartney and Anoushka Shankar (he’s godfather to her children), working across videogames, dance and theatre and performing at such prestigious venues as the Sydney Opera House, Hollywood Bowl and Royal Albert Hall, where he’s had his own BBC Proms.

A latter-day Renaissance man, Sawhney’s great capacity for ideas, for interrogating racism from the perspective of a second-generation immigrant, for expressing ways in which the universe could exist in harmony, informs everything he does. As we sit on a couch in a room occupied by pianos, mixing desks, Southeast Asian percussion instruments and an arsenal of guitars (he’s an accomplished flamenco guitarist), he holds forth on topics including his faith in the truth-to-power leanings of the younger generation, the cyclic nature of history and the rise and fall of despots (“The thing is, idiots ultimately hang themselves”) and more extensively, the links between music, maths and the ­cosmos.

Several years ago, as the featured guest on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs series, Sawhney chose The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications, a 1997 nonfiction book by physicist David Deutsch, as the tome he’d choose to read if castaway. It’s a choice that dovetails with Sawhney’s expansive and inclusive world view, evidenced everywhere from posts about music he made on X mid-last year to his seminal 1999 album Beyond Skin – which samples his late father, a chemical engineer, musing on why they migrated from North India to the UK (“They encouraged the people to come and work so I applied for the voucher”) and nuclear-bomb inventor Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”).

“Music is the language of the universe, the poetic sound of mathematical relationships and the pure voice of our hearts,” he stated. “Everything I have learned in my life is through the filter of music.”

How do music and maths overlap? “Patterns is one way,” he says. “Recognising relationships between numbers and how they interlock. Both maths and music are universal languages. Pythagoras, for example, found this with ratios and the ways in which string (tones) work. Bach looked at fractals and inversions of phrases.

The juxtaposition of polyrhythms in African music is very mathematical. Even Einstein said that relativity came to him through his musical intuition and not his scientific brain.”

Having grown up, one of three brothers, in Rochester, Kent, learning piano, guitar, sitar and tabla from an early age, stoking his creative impulse in response to the racist bullying he received at school and near home (he’s spoken of avoiding gangs of National Front white supremacists, and of his family’s front garden being vandalised), Sawhney studied law then accountancy before co-creating the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me.

He quit comedy to pursue music, releasing his debut album Spirit Dance in 1993 and spearheading London’s Asian Underground club scene, DJing the sort of tunes he’d set about creating.

UK musician Nitin Sawhney. Picture: Suki Dhanda

His propensity for analytical thinking, for solving equations and finding patterns, remained.

While Sawhney likes to use mathematics as a tool to discover relationships between different musical forms, he has never compromised on his music’s emotive power.

His signature blend of Southeast Asian ragas, dancefloor grooves and lush electronic soundscapes, alongside his ego-less knack for collaborating with the finest vocalists and musicians around – oh, and for engaging with issues at the heart of politics – continues to win him standing ovations.

Need proof? Lie on the floor and listen to the phenomenal Homelands from Beyond Skin (which he performed in Australia as part of a “retrospective revisitation” world tour in 2019), or the poignant Definition of Happy from Identity, and prepare to swoon.

Or go see him play at WOMADelaide next month, where he’ll be cherry picking songs from his repertoire and investing them with new urgency: “When you have global society or social media or some kind of communal feeling of oppression happening, it’s important to have a way of venting that. That’s the first function of music for me.”

His preferred method of creating music is through communing with the universe. “Beethoven wrote his best music after he was completely deaf, finding something greater than himself. Ravi Shankar said he was simply a medium through which the raga (melodic framework) manifests. Michelangelo talked about finding the form inside the marble.

“The universe already has the music.” A smile. “It’s there within the fabric of reality.”

He tells me he wrote a piece of music inspired by Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which follows six astronauts on an orbiting space station, and which he read as one of the literary prize’s five judges.

“I could hear the soundtrack very clearly in my head as I turned each of its 136 pages,” says Sawhney, who read 156 books across seven months. “I averaged 100 pages an hour, and a book in four hours. It was such a rich tapestry of universes to be immersed in on a daily basis.”

Speaking of universes, he had dinner the other night with new friends including his cardiologist, a member of the team who “brought all my particles back into solid form, helped me rejoin the corporeal world. It was nice to talk to him as a human being as opposed to this idealised person.”

Their conversation touched on music and its ability to offer empathy, a sense of community, a common humanity. “And heart,” he says. “You can hear the heart in music. And right now, in this fractured world, we need to express this more than ever.”

Nitin Sawhney plays at WOMADelaide in Adelaide on March 7 and 10.