Vatan Singh Rajan Draws From Disquiet on New EP ‘Alone’

From starting out as a self-taught drummer at the age of 8 in New Delhi to now leading bands in New York, Indian jazz multi-instrumentalist Vatan Singh Rajan clearly has the chops.

The 27-year-old studied at the Global Institute of Music in Delhi NCR at 15, went on to study at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York between 2017 and 2025. It would’ve been natural to assume the artist’s debut solo project would’ve been a showcase of virtuoso skills, but Alone EP—released on Nov. 9, 2025—is as hair-raisingly experimental as they come.

Made during the height of the pandemic when Rajan was back in India to take care of family, the artist tells Rolling Stone India work on Alone EP began in mid-2021. “I made this record just for myself, and had no intention of releasing it publicly,” Rajan says.

When the Vatan Singh Rajan Quartet was invited to a residency at the Bern International Jazz Festival in Switzerland a while later, the bandleader dove back into the material to play songs on drums and piano to open their sets. “I wanted to release the album in 2023, but the composer of the first track and my hero, Carla Bley, passed away that year. Her death hit me pretty hard, and it took me two years to want to release it again,” Rajan says. Her song, “And Now The Queen,” opens the EP poignantly, setting the tone for an atmospheric, unsettling and improvisational-heavy set that has never been heard from an Indian jazz drummer.

Considering Miles Davis’ seminal album Kind of Blue sparked Rajan’s interest in jazz and the artist has learned from jazz drumming legend Bill Stewart (a prolific composer who’s also played on albums by jazz greats by John Scofield, Pat Metheny and Maceo Parker, among others), Rajan’s Alone EP is suitably weird and wonderful.

Every instrument used across four tracks was custom-built and every mic used for recording was engineered by hand. The song “I Am a Microphone,” for example, draws from metallurgy as well as Rajan’s research on cymbals. The cinematic “Musashi” features drum set and rainstick, drawing from Japanese cult cinema. “Prelude I: La Colombe” is a rendition of French artist Oliver Messiaen’s composition, with piano and drums in a duet like there’s no tomorrow.

Understandably, Rajan says an ideal setting to listen to Alone EP would be, of course, in solitude. “I took great care to mix it so that it would sound good on anything. That said, I would not consider it easy listening. ‘Alone’ is best heard, well, alone on whatever device you want in a quiet environment,” the artist says.

The intricately-crafted EP also marks Rajan’s multi-instrumentalist proclivities, something chalked down to the artist’s “musical needs and how my brain works.” Rajan says, “I’m diagnosed autistic and teaching myself instruments has always been instinctive and keeps me in touch with that side of my brain.” With each instrument, Rajan believes a musician has a specific personality. The composer adds, “Large parts of this album are improvised. Every musician has a unique improvisational voice, and a large part of jazz philosophy is about combining those unique improvisational voices.”

Rajan was in the thick of improvisation all through life as a musician, from being in at least 10 bands in New Delhi to now leading trios and quartets with rotating instrumentation in New York. On reaching New York, Rajan amusedly describes it less as daunting and more as “a kid in a candy store.” The artist adds, “I had made up my mind at a very young age that if I was going to dedicate my life to music, I was going to throw myself into the largest proverbial frying pan I could find, and that has always been New York.”

Collaborators on past and upcoming projects include Grammy-winning pianist Rachel Z, guitarist Andres Thielen, saxophonist Santosh Sharma, and guitarist-producer Maia Van Praag. With the catharsis of putting out Alone now washing over Rajan, the jazz artist is “both nervous and excited” looking at what’s coming up. Rajan says, “I’m releasing another album of contemporary classical/experimental classical music soon, featuring more chamber works like my Concerto for Bowed Cymbals, ‘Blacksmith’, and a piece that uses my microtonal research (most of my graduate study) called ‘The Archimiedes Principle.’” Turns out, that last composition is being used as a teaching tool at conservatories and has led to a workshop and residency at Vermont’s avant-garde music festival Nu Mu in August 2026.

Closer home, Rajan has been writing for orchestra and working with singer Anuradha Juju Palakurthi and Juju Productions. “I will be creating modern orchestrations of Indian classics for their ‘Symphony Masala’ project. I’m really looking forward to that,” the artist adds.