“It was a spiritual experience. It was the most amazing night of spontaneous improvisation I’ve been involved in." — Lee Carroll
Recording and In Performance: Carroll, Brock, and Vishnu
A blend of cultures, from the classical music of India to the jazz of America
Vishnu R, Lee Carroll, Zach Brock
By Walter Tunis
Contributing Writer
(Photos provided by the artists)
A funny thing happened on the way to the Glass Art Lounge.
The night prior to playing a June 2025 performance with the Indian/World music ensemble Gandharva at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, Vishnu Ramprasad — known professionally as Vishnu R — was invited to sit in on a set at Trifecta Glass Art Lounge led by keyboardist Lee Carroll.
It wasn’t exactly a chance meeting. Carroll heads up GreenRoom Exchange, the cross-cultural performance initiative he co-founded with wife Connie Milligan that presented the Gandharva performance. At Trifecta, though, Carroll wanted to engage in a direct musical West-meets-East conversation with Ramprasad and the distinctive hybrid guitar instrument devised by the latter called the Navtar (more on that in a minute). To round out the performance, Lexington violinist and Grammy-winning Snarky Puppy member Zach Brock was also invited to join in.
Three schooled musicians from two seemingly disparate musical cultures meeting and playing together on one stage. Something was brewing.
“That show we did at Trifecta with those guys that night ... it was almost as if the people in the audience were lifted three inches off their chairs,” Carroll recalls. “It was a spiritual experience. It was the most amazing night of spontaneous improvisation I’ve been involved in.
“That’s when I realized I had to see if I could get Vishnu back here and do something. Plus, he’s a great guy. He’s highly educated, a citizen of the world who is also a very kind, sweet human being. He and Zach hit it off big time.”
Vishnu R performing on his invention, the Navtar.
Following the Lyric concert, Carroll took Ramprasad into Duane Lundy’s Lexington Recording Company studio to cut a pair of original tunes — fusion works that suggested, rather openly borrowed from, Eastern inspiration. One year on, Carroll has invited Ramprasad back to Lexington without Gandharva to expand on the music the two of them had been cooking up with Brock. .The three will collaborate on more studio music before headlining a benefit concert alongside bassist Danny Cecil and drummer John Knight for GreenRoom Exchange titled “Windows to the World” at the Apiary on July 26.
“Lee is the person who imagined this whole project and brought everybody together personality-wise and musically, as well,” said Brock by phone recently from Madrid, where he was performing with Snarky Puppy. “We basically came to these tunes Lee wrote as we would as improvisers in the realms of jazz and, for lack of a better term, world music at large, which encompasses multiple continental styles.
“I’ve been a huge fan of music coming out of India for a long time. I can’t play it. I never studied it, but I have it in my ear. With Vishnu, that’s his realm, but he has also studied so much guitar playing and just music in general from all over the world.
“He’s checked out, I’m sure, all the same guitar players I have, from John McLaughlin to Jimi Hendrix to Wes Montgomery. That’s the place where we meet as musicians. On top of it all is Lee, who is giving us this freedom to just be ourselves. It’s a very unself-conscious meeting when you have somebody who has written music where all you’re asked to do is show up as yourself and not try to be anything other than that. That’s, like, the best thing you could ever hope for.”
Lexington-based Grammy awarded violinist Zach Brock.
Enter the Navtar
Okay, let’s approach the Vishnu R reimagining of the guitar. The instrument he plays is a nine-string instrument of his own invention called the Navtar. It possesses six fretted strings, three fretless strings, and another dozen sympathetic strings for harp and sitar-like sounds.
“The instrument was born out of the necessity to bridge two traditions that I grew up with,” said the Bengaluru, India-based Ramprasad by phone from Washington, D.C., where he was conducting a workshop. “I come from a family of Carnatic (South Indian classical) musicians. A lot of the ragas from that tradition use microtonal voicings. I quickly realized as I got deep into playing Carnatic music on the guitar that the presence of frets doesn’t really allow for these kinds of microtonal movements. I experimented by removing the frets off my guitar and it worked wonderfully for Carnatic music. It sounded almost voice-like, but I couldn’t play harmonies. That was another aspect of my music. I studied Western classical music and jazz and without the presence of chords and harmony, I was left with a void, a space where I was not able to bridge these two forms of music in my compositions.
“The thought process was, ‘How can I double up and design one instrument that can offer me the possibilities to play both the microtonal ragas as well as Western harmony and chords?’ That’s how the Navtar came to be.”
“Vishnu invented this instrument, so he’s completely fluent,” Carroll said. “He can play Western style jazz guitar, but then he also gets on those fretless strings and starts playing what we call ‘blue notes,’ notes in between. It’s just a very different aesthetic when he starts playing on the fretless strings.”
The only contrary issue with playing the Navtar? Simple. If it breaks, you have a problem. And that’s exactly what happened during Ramprasad’s 2025 visit to Lexington with Gandharva.
“Vishnu stayed at our house when Gandharva played,” Carroll remembered. “Somebody knocked the instrument over and broke the headstock on it. It wasn’t like you could just go to Guitar Center and get another one. I took him to Willcutt’s (Willcutt Guitars on Rosemont Garden). We walked in with the thing and they just looked at it. But, man, they put it back together overnight. It was really a scare. There is no other instrument. He just has the one.”
“With our show only a couple of days away, it became quite a stressful moment,” Ramprasad added. “But, thankfully, there are some very good luthiers in Lexington and we got them to glue the instrument back together in time. Since then, fingers crossed, there have been no more challenges of that kind.”
Composer-keyboardist Lee Carroll.
Somebody's Listening
While the distinct design of the Eastern-rooted Navtar likely ups the appeal of a jam session for a Western-bred musician, Brock stressed that what makes any new musical situation productive isn’t the instruments involved, be they familiar or foreign, but rather the instincts and musicianship of the artists playing them.
“Anytime you go outside your own country, whether one is aware of it or not, you’re sort of engaging in an act of diplomacy,” Brock said. “One of the particular superpower aspects to all that — it’s so cliché, but it’s really true — is this universal way where people can meet instantaneously. It doesn’t even take a rehearsal. It can happen in real time in front of an audience.
“I feel like Vishnu’s open mindedness to take his training and then listen to all this other music he also was inspired by and loves and, after that, take a chance by jumping into an airplane to come over and play with a bunch of musicians in Lexington, Kentucky that he doesn’t know is one of the best things about music.”
“Great musicians listen,” Ramprasad said. “As you gain experience, you realize one of the most important things is just the art of listening. You don’t have to always show what you’ve got or play all your cards at once. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is allow the other musicians to express themselves. Lee and Zach are extremely receptive and their intuitions are very sharp. That results from musicians listening to each other.”
“You don’t need any translation when you communicate through music,” Carroll added. “Language is almost a barrier. You find that out as soon as people quit talking and start playing. In the world we live in right now, there are few barriers for anybody who wants to delve into music from another culture. There are so many commonalities. With musicians of such fine caliber as Zach and Vishnu, there is no barrier in communication.”
Windows to the World
A concert benefiting GreenRoom Exchange featuring Zach Brock, Vishnu R, and Lee Carroll.
5:30 p.m. July 26 at the Apiary, 218 Jefferson St. Doors open at 5 p.m. Indian cuisine and a cash bar will be offered after the concert. Tickets: $100 at greenroomexchange.org/events.