Meanwhile, her dad’s parents, who lived with her in L.A., loved Bollywood soundtracks.
Those multicultural influences shaped what would become the driving question of her work: how do you invite people from different cultures onto the same stage to build a relationship and create music together?
“It starts the dialogue because you’ve both already created beauty together,” she said.
As an elementary school student, Esmail would beg her parents to tag along to classical music concerts. It was too heavy, they told her. She wouldn’t appreciate it.
Esmail’s response? “I will appreciate it. I will figure out how to appreciate it.
“I remember thinking, ‘I need to figure out how this music works,” she added.
Esmail’s talent soon became clear. She began playing piano at age 11.
“I had a practice curfew. My dad would kick me off the piano at 11:00 p.m. every night, [saying] ‘You have to be done. We need to go to sleep.’”
But performing on stage was a different story.
“My arms would shake. My legs would be shaking. Sometimes when you panic, your fingers get sweaty and then your hands are sliding off the keys,” Esmail recalled. “Just an avalanche of disaster.”
“You are terrified every time you have to play in front of people,” she recalls her parents telling her. “Are you sure you want to do this for the rest of your life?”
Her teachers at the L.A. County High School for the Arts encouraged her to consider a different way of making music without having to perform on stage: composing. Her early compositions got her into Juilliard, earned her a Fulbright in India and launched a career that’s earned her countless accolades, including her current stint as artist-in-residence with the L.A. Master Chorale.
Composing is how Esmail has made her mark — by putting Western classical musicians in conversation with Indian artists, building bridges between violinists and sitar players, tabla drummers and Western singers. Her music has been performed by major orchestras and choirs all over the world.
“I just feel like I’m living my dream because as a young child, there were so many times where I couldn’t rectify the cultures that I was living in,” Esmail said. Now, her music is helping others bridge those worlds.
“[Indian American] teenagers… now actually say to me, ‘We had that same feeling. We felt like we couldn’t rectify these cultures. And then we heard your music and it was everything that we are in one piece.’”
One of her most-performed compositions is a piece called Ta Re Ki Ta, originally created with singers from the Urban Voices Project who have currently or recently experienced being unhoused on L.A.’s Skid Row.
“How [do] these people who have so many major life concerns find the time to sing?” Esmail remembers wondering. “Then when you meet them,” Esmail said, “you realize this is how they’re getting through all those things.”
Esmail taught the singers onomatopoeic sounds that imitate the sound of a tabla, kind of like scatting in jazz. Today, choirs around the world can follow Esmail’s instructions to pronounce the syllables using different parts of the mouth and tongue.
One of Esmail’s most ambitious works for the L.A. Master Chorale, called Malhaar, focuses on drought and water in California.
The project is inspired by music Esmail heard while attending Catholic church, listening to requiems, or songs of mourning.
