Standards Vol. 1 (EP) Rafiq Bhatia

• 1 In A Sentimental Mood 03:46
• 2 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face 04:11
• 3 Lonely Woman 03:56
• 4 The Single Petal Of A Rose 04:41
• Total Runtime 16:34

Info for Standards Vol. 1 (EP)

Working with a cast of traditional jazz’s most beloved musicians including the three-time GRAMMY-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, Bhatia implements dreamlike and sometimes volatile electronic techniques to recast classic repertoire as a window into the darkness underlying ordinary American life.

In his latest project, Standards Vol. 1, he collaborates with some of jazz’s most distinguished musicians on a surprising and oblique take on the canonical jazz repertoire. The results retain some of the texture and feeling of jazz, but sit firmly outside of the music’s conventions. You may have heard these songs before, but you’ve never heard them like this.

“His transient approach, combined with his obsession of assiduously studying the past in order to break cleanly from it, makes him one of the most intriguing figures in music today.” (New York Times)

Bhatia and Salvant’s creative partnership makes perfect sense when you consider the pair’s shared love of David Lynch — Twin Peaks, in particular. The pair’s version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” comes across like a chilly Black Lodge rendition of Roberta Flack, vis-à-vis Laura Palmer, emphasizing the original’s nods not just love, but loss. Alternately pastoral and surreal, Salvant’s mesmerizing delivery and Bhatia’s ice-sculptural production foreground shadowy implications latent within the song’s subconscious: “like the trembling heart of a captive bird that was there at my command.”

McLorin Salvant‘s singular talent for recontextualizing lyrical meaning will be familiar to anyone who has experienced her deadpan readings of problematic songs that were socially acceptable back in the day. "She'll just stare at the audience as she sings," explains Bhatia. "Her voice has all the agility and control in the world, yet that doesn’t stop her from going monotone, or ugly, or outright destructive. It’s an incredibly fluid conception of what the voice can and should do."

Eschewing nostalgia or emulation, Standards Vol. 1 is a deeply personal and decidedly un-standard record that will have you thinking about the possibilities of jazz in an entirely new way. Bhatia’s committedly experimental orientation may also seem at odds with his choice of collaborators for this EP: erudite, virtuosic acoustic instrumentalists who are largely venerated by the jazz orthodoxy. But there’s an unlikely depth to the history and common ground uniting them that dismantles this false dichotomy, making Standards Vol. 1 Bhatia’s most provocative, forward-looking output yet.

"When you put on a record by Ellington, Monk, Ornette, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda — these artists have such a distinctive approach that you canimmediately tell who it is,” Bhatia explains. “Sensing the human story behind the notes is what got me into jazz in the first place. I feel the same way after hearing two seconds of Madlib, Tim Hecker, or Jlin. All of these artists have a sound that's iconic because it’s personal. For me, that's the unifying factor in all of this.”

Rafiq Bhatia, arrangement, electronics, programming, sound design (on tracks 1-4), guitar (on track 3)
Cecile McLorin Salvant, vocals (on track 2)
Chris Pattishall, piano (on tracks 1, 4), additional programming and sound design (on tracks 1, 2)
Craig Weinrib, drums (on track 3)
Riley Mulherkar, trumpet (on track 1)
Stephen Riley, tenor saxophone (on tracks 1, 3)

Rafiq Bhatia
The New York Times  proclaims “Rafiq Bhatia is writing his own musical language,” heralding him as “one of the most intriguing figures in music today.” A guitarist, producer, and Academy Award-nominated composer “who refuses to be pinned to one genre, culture or instrument,” Bhatia makes sculptural, meticulously crafted music that finds common ground among ecstatic avant-garde jazz, mournful soul, fractured beats and building-shaking electronics. “He treats his guitar, synthesizers, drum machines and electronic effects as architectural elements,” the Times writes. “Sound becomes contour; music becomes something to step into rather than merely follow.”

Bhatia’s first LP for Anti- Records, 2018’s Breaking English, has been described as “stunningly focused...a vibrant new instrumental sound world where crushing beats, nimble guitar licks, and shifting electronic textures coalesce with a visceral bite” (Chicago Reader). His subsequent release, 2020’s Standards Vol. 1 EP, renders repertoire from the American songbook “completely deconstructed, infused with brand new textures and electronic effects, dreamlike and beautiful” (BBC). In 2025 he presents EP Each Dream, A Melting Door and full-length release Environments, his first solo release since co-scoring 2023’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Across the EP’s five tracks, Bhatia and pianist Chris Pattishall improvise to conjure environments of sound that evolve at nature’s pace—but crucially—also carry its unpredictable stakes. Unfurling seamlessly like a short film, the result is sculptural, sleepwalking music that rewards patience and deep listening, illuminating fleeting pathways towards the journey inward.

In the five years since his last solo release, Bhatia has collaborated with a beguiling breadth of artists with little in common other than their iconoclastic outputs. As a member of the experimental pop outfit Son Lux, together with whom he earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for their head-spinning Everything Everywhere  score, Bhatia has worked with David Byrne, André Benjamin, and Mitski. On Blue, Bhatia’s collaboration with Thai master director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was recently performed live by Alarm Will Sound during back-to-back nights at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, while the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater internationally toured a twenty minute work set to selections from Bhatia’s 2020 EP, Standards Vol. I. Since its release, Bhatia has continued to deepen his engagement with jazz, appearing alongside Ambrose Akinmusire, Dave Douglas, Ganavya, James Brandon Lewis, and Samora Pinderhughes in addition to producing arresting debut records for Pattishall and trumpeter Riley Mulherkar.

As a composer, Bhatia has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Walker Art Center, Public Records, the Kennedy Center, Jennifer Koh, Liquid Music Series, National Sawdust, Newfields, The Jazz Gallery, Toledo Museum of Art, and more. A voracious collaborator working across musical communities and artistic disciplines, Bhatia has also created with Arooj Aftab, Holland Andrews, Michael Cina, Teju Cole, Sam Dew, Billy Hart, Marcus Gilmore, Shahzad Ismaily, Vijay Iyer, Glenn Kotche, Okkyung Lee, Qasim Naqvi, Helado Negro, Kassa Overall, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Alex Somers, Moses Sumney, Rajna Swaminathan, Kiah Victoria, David Virelles and others. He has contributed to recordings on Brownswood, City Slang, ECM, Glassnote, Greenleaf Music, Joyful Noise, New Amsterdam, RCA and Temporary Residence Ltd.

Bhatia is a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow, and a former artist-in-residence at Duke Performances. He has been invited to speak by the National Gallery of Art, Big Ears Festival, Berklee College of Music, Melbourne International Jazz Festival and IUPUI, and is currently adjunct faculty of the New School’s Performer-Composer Master of Music program. His music is published in association with Domino Publishing Company.

This album contains no booklet.