Author: Laura Casteel
From reinventions of jazz classics on "Standards Vol. 1" to the lush soundscapes of "Breaking English," Rafiq Bhatia's music reflects the influence of multiple continents, his college studies in economics and neuroscience, and the many sonic and geographical intersections of the state in which he grew up. As guitarist and co-producer for Son Lux, his career has taken him from North Carolina to the Oscars stage, when the band composed the Academy Award-nominated score for 2023 Best Picture-winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. This February, Son Lux announced that they would be scoring the new Marvel Studios film Thunderbolts*, debuting in U.S. theaters May 2nd, 2025. That same month, Bhatia released a new EP, Each Dream, a Melting Door, in collaboration with longtime friend Chris Pattishall, who grew up in Durham, North Carolina. Pattishall has developed his own formidable reputation as a jazz pianist, earning praise from the likes of Wynton Marsalis.
Last April, Bhatia returned to Raleigh to join the lineup for the 2024 Music at the Museum Festival at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Before his performance, he discussed some of his most formative musical experiences with Come Hear NC producer Laura Casteel, surrounded by the striking sculptures of the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park. In celebration of Bhatia’s recent work, we’re sharing the full interview here for the first time.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Laura Casteel: Tell me about one of your earliest musical experiences.
Rafiq Batia: So when I was very, very young, one of the first musical memories that I have is of listening to my grandfather just sing to himself. It was kind of a practice he would do while he was working or while he was walking or just passing time, and he would sing ginans. They're like Muslim hymns, almost. To this day, I’ve heard very few people sing the way that he did, with the kind of reedy sound that he would produce, this nasal sound. It would have this undulation inside of it that would tell us how the time was passing, like a pulse. It was really soothing to me, and it gave me a sense that no matter what was going on around us, we were safe. It was a beautiful sound and memory that I think I'll carry with me forever. He passed some years ago, but whenever I hear recordings of his voice singing, they line up exactly with my memory. There are few things where our memories correlate exactly with the actual experience of the world. This is one of those memories that is very deeply imprinted in me.
LC: That's beautiful. One of the most recognizable things about your music, I think, is its defiance of categorization and genre. In a similar vein, as someone who was born in Hickory and raised in Cary by parents of East African-Indian background, how has living in the intersections of so many different identities shaped your artistic practice?
RB: So I was born in Hickory, raised just outside of Raleigh. I went to school in Raleigh and it's the place that shaped me, but my parents were immigrants. They were born and raised in East Africa and before that, my family was from India. So going to these different continents, there were a lot of different communities that my family passed through and a lot of influences from all of that migration were felt in our household, even as I was growing up and having this tie to these other places and these other ways of being and thinking. I found myself having a very hybrid experience, and for me, the process of reconciling all of those things was like an inherent desire to find balance and cohesion between it all and to find a way of existing that respects all of those different things. So when it came time to start putting together music, which for me has always been like a form of therapy and a form of expression, an affirmation of that hybrid identity, categories or genres weren't ever something that I observed strictly because I never fit into those boundaries anyways. That was beautiful to me, and so my music, like my being as a person, is hybrid.
LC: How has North Carolina specifically influenced your development as a musician?
RB: In my desire to find a way of expressing this very hybrid personhood that I was coming into as a teenager, I was led by some teachers to check out the music of folks like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, both of whom were born in North Carolina, and I was just struck by how incredibly, deeply personal their way of expressing themselves through sound was. You can just hear two seconds of a recording of either of them and immediately know who it is. It's so distinct and idiosyncratic, but not because it's trying to be different or push people so much as it is this beautiful, whole, sincere, honest expression of a person's perspective and a person's story. That was so deeply inspiring to me and the way that that music was formed in a historical context, in the face of immense odds and backlash and negative pressure. It's a very inspiring and very American art form. It's something that I carry with me always as the pinnacle of inspiration, and a lot of that influence originated here.
LC: You have a degree in mathematical economics and did your research thesis in neuroscience. What can musicians learn from STEM fields?
RB: When I was in college, I already knew that I loved music and wanted to learn more about it, be part of it, be around it, but I never thought to myself that that was a viable course for my life to take in terms of a career path. There weren't a lot of people out there who looked like me doing it visibly, but at the same time, I also realized that so much of what I was interested in about music was about connection. It was about empathy. When we hear a sound, there's a part of our brain that is imagining the human actions that led to that sound being created, or any animal or environmental force that might be creating a sound. We evolved to be cognizant of all these sorts of things. So as deeply as I was interested in sound as a way of tapping into that empathy, I also was curious about how that part of us works, how we think and feel and relate to the world and the people around us. Also, with an interest in improvised music, I was curious about how we behave in conditions where there is risk or uncertainty. Getting more exposed to cognitive neuroscience and the kinds of research that people do in that field really influenced me and was something that I wanted to be around. One thing that I would stress about both of those seemingly disparate directions is that both music and the psychological, cognitive, and behavioral sciences are interested in what makes us think, what makes us feel, and how we connect to each other.
LC: Your work with Son Lux has been described as not just songs or albums, but musical “worlds.” How does building the world of a standalone song or album differ from scoring a film, such as Everything Everywhere All at Once, where you’re bringing to life the world in the mind of a filmmaker?
RB: When you're making a piece of music that lives alone, you have this complete and total freedom to imagine the possibilities of what world you might be able to evoke in sound. It's a very open-ended, seemingly limitless exercise, and that amount of freedom can even be overwhelming for some of us, but I think when you're scoring a film, at least for me, and in the collaborations that I've undertaken with my bandmates in Son Lux, we're almost hoping that the score disappears into the fabric of the whole work. We don't necessarily want to feel like people are singling out the music or paying disproportionate attention to the music, especially in a way that distracts from what else is going on, because ultimately, the thing I think that we want is for someone to experience the film as a whole and just feel like it was a really powerful and moving film, not necessarily that the score did the work on its own, because we're part of a team and we're telling a story together. There is a really inspiring producer and engineer that we in Son Lux have worked with a lot named Chris Tabron, and one thing that he said in an interview that I always think about when we're scoring a film is that when he's mixing someone else's song, he doesn't want someone to be like, you did a really good job making the snare drum sound good, or you know, the drums feel really sad. He wants them to close their eyes and move their bodies, and when they get done experiencing the song, to open their eyes and say, you know what, that was a really great song, and the mix just disappears into everything. I think scoring a film is kind of similar. We just want the sound to be one feature of a larger whole and everything working in concert together.
LC: How does it feel to not only return to North Carolina, but to be performing with musicians who are so synonymous with the North Carolina scene, such as Tift Merritt and Rissi Palmer?
RB: It's a tremendous honor to be invited to present our music here at the North Carolina Museum of Art on this bill with a stacked lineup of musicians who all, in diverse and beautiful ways, represent different aspects of the great breadth of what North Carolina music exists as out in the world. I feel so lucky every time I'm asked to play here. It's indescribable how stepping off the plane and just smelling the air here brings me back to so many beautiful and formative memories in a place. It's something that I heard talked about a lot when I was growing up as a child. The cliche of being able to feel the presence of a place that's had such an important impact on your life instantaneously with just as much as a scent is a real phenomenon, and even just in the last twelve hours that I've been back home, it's been taking me back to a lot of the experiences that shaped who I am and shaped the music that I make. So, to be able to share it here with all of you is really special.
Follow Rafiq Bhatia:
Official Site: http://www.rafiqbhatia.com/
Facebook: /rafiqbhatia
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Youtube: @RafiqBhatiaMusic