'Divine Tides' pays tribute to the environment and the magnificence of earth, and wins a Grammy
Indian music composer Ricky Kej wins his second Grammy for his collaborative album, Divine Tides, along with Stewart Copeland. The album is a tribute to the beauty of planet earth and the message it conveys is that there is enough and more for every species to coexist in harmony.
गाँव कनेक्शन 5 April 2022 10:58 AM GMT
Photo: Ricky Kej/@rickykej on Twitter
On April 4, 2022, Ricky Kej and Stewart Copeland won an Award for Best New Age Album, for Divine Tides at the 64th Grammy Awards. Indian music composer Ricky Kej is no stranger to awards and this is his second Grammy Award, the first being in 2015 for his album, Winds of Samsara, in the same category.
Divine Tides, which is a collaboration between Kej and Stewart Copeland, rock-legend and drummer of the rock band The Police (this is his sixth Grammy), has nine songs with eight music videos. They are, Wonders of Life, Himalayas, Our Home, Art of Devotion, Pastoral India, I am Change – 2021 Remastered, A Prayer, Gandhi and Mother Earth.
The album is significant as it resonates with the concerns of the earth and the environment today. In each song, it is Nature who is shown in all her glory. And, Kej, who has been an ambassador for the environment for years now, has shot for the album across the country from Ladakh and the North East to the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu and the great Indian Thar Desert. Mountains, rivers, birds, beasts, reptiles and trees are shown in their magnificence. The message being that there is enough place on the planet to co-exist, live and let live.
In his acceptance speech at the Grammy's on April 4, at Las Vegas, Kej referred to Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam –– the world as one family. To him, it was important that the human species coexist in harmony with the other species it shared the planet with and that Divine Tides was all about "... the entities that live on this planet, whether it is the wildlife, the forest, the elements of nature which as the water we drink, the air we breathe, the land we walk on".
Inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, Tej in collaboration with Lonnie Parks and The Earth Band, brought out a collection of 27 songs called My Earth Songs, in 2018. He also composed the background score for the acclaimed documentary Wild Karnataka, narrated by Sir David Attenborough in 2019.
