This Chennai band, Many Things, is all about jazz, blues and beyond

Meet the members of the band Many Things that will perform songs from its upcoming debut album this Friday

When jazz saxophonist, Maarten Visser, bass guitarist and national award-winning composer Aravind Murali, heavy metal drummer and mridangam player, Manu Krishnan, got together about three years back, they talked about forming a band “with no boundaries”. 

Aravind says, “We talked about ‘many things’ but due to the pandemic nothing happened for two years till January 2022 when we decided to form a band.“ They decided to call it Many Things.

“We decided to call it that since each one of our compositions is a ‘Thing’. Our songs are called ‘Thing 1’ , ‘Thing 2’ , ‘Thing 3’ , ‘A Tricky Thing’, ‘Swing Thing’,” he adds with a wry smile. 

The band treads the fine line between premeditation and improvisation, and in a short span of 10 months, they have garnered national attention. The band was recently invited to perform at the Indo German Jazz Week in Bangalore along with international jazz acts like the Klaus Graf Quartet, Germany, the Arifa Quartet from the Netherlands and so on.

Indian pianist-composer Aman Mahajan says, “‘The music of ‘Many Things’ is immersive and tastefully crafted. They have a hybrid sound spanning classical music, jazz, funk, the blues and beyond.”

The band’s diverse voices lend to the unique flavour that each member brings to the table.

Take for instance Maarten Visser, an alumna of Brabants Conservatorium in Holland specialising in contemporary improvised music. He later came to Chennai in 1998 to study Carnatic music and collaborated with dancer Padmini Chettur in 2000.