Joey van Leeuwen is the kind of musician who’s always chasing the next sound, rhythm, or unexpected musical rabbit hole. The American drummer, composer, and educator moves seamlessly between jazz, classical, folk, and contemporary music, with a curiosity that has taken him from the US to India and deep into Carnatic, Ewe, and Fon musical traditions. Now, with his latest album, Stray, we catch up with Joey for a conversation about India, travel, music, belonging, and the stories hiding behind the songs.
So, what inspired Stray? “I’ve been working on some of these songs since 2019, all inspired by my travels in India. I first visited in 2017 and saw an incredible concert by Zakir Hussain ji and Hariharan, which made me want to return and study the music. I came back in 2018 and eventually moved to India after graduate school. While staying at a hostel, I became attached to three stray puppies who would visit us. When the property owner fenced them out, I felt a deep connection with them. Their experience made me think about borders, displacement, and belonging, particularly in relation to India and Partition, my wife’s family history in West Bengal, and the divisions I see in the US today. That became the inspiration for Stray and shaped the rest of the album.”
When asked how his collaboration with Bengaluru-based musician Sharik Hasan came about, he says, “Sharik and I met in Singapore. When I was living in Chennai, I got in touch with the well-known pianist Jeremy Monteiro and suggested we do something together. I thought I’d fly to Singapore, play a gig, cover the cost of my flight, and get a free holiday out of it. Instead, Jeremy took me around the city and introduced me to everyone. That’s how I came across Sharik. He was playing with saxophonist Sean Hong Wei, who is based in New York. Sharik also started coming to a late-night jam session I hosted at a warehouse—an underground, almost speakeasy-like venue. That’s where I first heard him play. We hit it off and talked about working together, and I invited him to some rehearsals. His style was a perfect fit for what I was doing, so we started working together. Sharik also has a similar experience of movement and travel—he was born in India, lived in Singapore for years, and has now moved to the United States. I think that shared experience has been an important part of our musical connection.”
Is there a particular song on the album that takes him back to a specific place, person, or moment? “Yeah, well, all the songs do. Mou’s Blues, for instance, is about my wife, who has been a pillar of support throughout our relationship. Willow is about a relationship and has its own story to it. Rickshaw Blues grew out of a chaotic night in Mumbai in 2018. After a disastrous tour, a broken phone, and cancelled gigs, I found myself at 3am in an auto-rickshaw with only a handwritten address. Unable to speak the language, I struggled to communicate with the driver, who eventually called my friend as we drove around in circles. The experience captures the spirit of jugaad, somehow improvising, adapting and finding your way.
How did living in India change the way he listens to and experiences music? “Well, from 2018 onwards, and especially from 2021, I studied Carnatic music with two gurus. I learned konnakol from Umayalpuram Mali and ghatam from N Rajaraman. At first, I approached konnakol the way many American musicians do—as a way to demonstrate technical ability. But after a while, I realised that wasn’t really the point. The music is sacred, and the real challenge is improvisation.Mali sir would invite me to practise with him, a violinist and other percussionists, but he would never tell me what was coming. We might suddenly move into a different tala or have to land somewhere unexpected, and I’d have to adapt everything I had prepared. It constantly kept me on my toes. That experience changed the way I approach rhythm. Carnatic music has a deep system and logic that I don’t find in quite the same way in jazz. I’ve carried that with me, and now I try to make sure that everything I play rhythmically has a point, a statement, and intention.”
Interestingly, the album also draws on ideas from the ancient Tamil literary text Tolkāppiyam. “My wife did her PhD on tiṇai. She studied an academic named Nirmal Sivamani. He developed this thing called Tiṇai Poetics. It was previously called ‘oikopoetics’ because they wanted to use a Western name so that it would gain some traction in the Western academic world. But really, it's tiṇai, and it comes from Sangam literature. She used it to talk about the fantasy literature she studied, including JRR Tolkien.
It also has, I think, real-world implications. When you look at India, you have a culture where, for one thing, people have been living in the same places for thousands of years. The connection that people have to everything that grows there, to the rocks, the trees and the animals, is so much deeper than what we have in the United States. And again, just like jazz, the United States is a brand-new country. We haven't figured things out yet.
But in India, you also have the echoes of thousands of years ago, and changes that happened in society that continue to resonate. You see that these things we think of as temporary really aren't. They continue on and on through the generations. People have all these different stories, all these different versions of the Bhagavad Gita, and every community is singing its own truth.
So what happens when people are disconnected from that reality and find themselves planted somewhere that is new to them? What does it mean to be permanently rooted in a place? What does it mean to be connected and to arrive somewhere — to root yourself?
Is that why he named the album Stray? “Yes. I think the beautiful thing about words, and about instrumental music, is that you can express so much through a single word. Stray can be both a noun and a verb. I strayed from my own colony and found my way to India, and my in-laws also took me in like a stray puppy, welcoming me into their family with such kindness.These are questions that remain very much on my mind, especially now that I’m living back in my home country, while my wife is an immigrant here and we’re navigating all the complexities that come with that.”
And if we call this album ultimately about belonging, where does he feel he belongs now? “Well, that’s a great question. I think the easy answer is to say that we’re all citizens of the world, and that’s one of the ideas I explore in the liner notes. When we try to define things, there’s always a problem. Take the coastline, for example. You might say, ‘The coastline is this long,’ but that isn’t really accurate because it keeps zigzagging. If you draw a straight line from Kolkata to Kanyakumari, it might be a certain length, but once you account for all the curves, it becomes much longer. Zoom in further and, in a sense, it tends towards infinity. I think our identities and relationships are much the same. There are so many layers that resist simple definitions."
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