All right, all other things aside, this here release is a solo EP from drummer/composer/writer Vatan Singh Rajan, who’s Delhi-bred and currently New York-based. Vatan is in the middle of a stint at The New School in the Big Apple, studying and playing jazz. Now, the above sentence would cause most people to scoff or cringe; such artists are very commonly labelled as overly intellectual, out of touch, and ‘floating above the rest of us’, mostly because that’s almost always the case. However, ‘Alone’, for that is this EP’s name, is absolutely not that. It’s jazz without pretence or metaphorical strings attached, and it’s quite the enjoyable listen to boot. No contrarian opinions and smoking jackets needed here.

One can sit and list the numerous influences or relatable sounds one can hear in the four tracks on here (lots of Antonio Sanchez and Takashi Kokubo in the bones of them, for example), but with ‘Alone’, this is simply not the point. This one (recorded during the pandemic, those three years we’ve all decided to delete from our collective memory) is all about ambience. Vatan’s drumming is perhaps the biggest driving force behind this; it’s very expressive, bright, almost conversational. Even though there’s no singing or specific lead instrumentation to be found here, the drumming has a hell of a lot to say. That’s not a commonplace occurrence, and someone of Vatan’s experience (a Piano Man jammer combined with the strange universe that is New York’s jazz scene) makes it rather memorable.

Take ‘I Am A Microphone’, the second track on the EP. It’s a strange piece of musical architecture, as it were; ebbing and flowing swells rub their walls against some spirited drumming that sounds disconsolate and a bit restless at the same time. It should be said that speaking about instrumentation like this instantly makes us think about being over-artistic commentators rather than music fans, but in this case, it really does make sense to describe it in this way. ‘Musashi’ sounds like some hyper-local fighting martial art if you weren’t watching it but listening to two people fighting for their lives from behind a screen. It’s quite a strange experience for those who haven’t explored the catacombs of ambient electronic music, for example, but for those who have, the story it’s telling is clear as can be.

The two pieces that bookend the thing, ‘And Now The Queen’ and ‘Prelude I – La Colombe’ are potentially the most poignant. The latter is a frantic trade-off between piano and drums; if you’ve heard two people talking over each trying to solve an argument about a topic both of them agree upon fundamentally, that is exactly what it sounds like. One would assume both are played together in one take, and one would be right. The former is maybe the most interesting one, however; a swirling khichdi (used as a compliment here) of sounds that evoke the sea, loneliness, the spirit of living through Covid alone, finding meaning in every square centimetre of one’s home, all of that. It’s an excellent snapshot of the time, and a lovely listen.

Look, ‘Alone’, at the end of the day, shows that Vatan Singh Rajan is great at making music and playing it, and ‘Alone’ is proof of that. But it’s perhaps a bit more. It’s, of course, trying to enjoy oneself and making cool stuff in the process. It’s believing in the idea of doing whatever one’s creative mind desires. It’s also, somehow, not difficult to listen to and relate to, despite all of its experimentation and journeys into the abstract. Jazz's left field has been trying to achieve this for a long time, and its successes in that endeavour are relatively few in number. This is one of them. Nice!

Listen here.