An Elk Grove teen prodigy learned more than 100 instruments. Now he has a break on TV
Mozart was the first music Neil Nayyar ever heard and the tale he tells sounds like a storybook’s fable.
The story started in the womb, the Elk Grove musical prodigy said, father Rajan resting a small stereo speaker on his pregnant wife’s belly, the strains of Mozart played in utero to baby Neil. The idea came from the library and a book for expectant mothers. Mother-to-be Sukhbinder absorbed the sounds that would shape their son, the musical seeds they sowed taking root even before young Neil took his first breath.
Now 16, the multitalented Indian-American musician has amassed and mastered more than 100 instruments and counting from all over the world in a musical adventure part-joy and part-discovery. The sound-world he’s creating has attracted the attention of listeners, media and music industry insiders alike.
“I’m spreading joy everywhere. I see people enjoying the music and it makes me practice,” Neil Nayyar said. “And it feels good also.”
Tall and handsome with a ready smile and thick swoop of hair that his mother still sweeps from his eyes, Neil is about to become a more familiar face. The young Nayyar, mother Sukhbinder Kaur, and a sampling of Neil’s many instruments are featured in Honda commercials airing in Northern California.
The hook: Kaur, a loyal Honda driver, unofficial roadie and Honda-dubbed “Sacramento Super Mom,” can fit 34 of Neil’s 107 instruments inside the family’s Honda HR-V.
“My son is Neil. He’s 16 years old,” Kaur says in the brief spot. “He gets to perform a lot of places and he has to carry a lot of instruments.”
Sacramento Super Mom comes to the rescue in her Honda sport utility vehicle and that’s a wrap.
Neil sits shotgun for the 30-second travelogue set to his electric sitar and bubbling percussion that ends outside Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center. Camera trickery shows the many sides of the talented teen on sitar; blowing on the Australian didgeridoo; plucking the Chinese guzheng and thrumming away on an Indian hand drum.
Neil and his folks still laugh about the marathon all-day March commercial shoot and the production trucks and crew that swarmed their quiet neighborhood; the masses of cable and patch cords that snaked through the house and the Elk Grove police motor officers dispatched for traffic control during the filming.
A River Cats score
Sacramento River Cats fans will also hear Neil’s sitar when he performs the “Star-Spangled Banner” May 28 before the ‘Cats take on the Salt Lake Bees at Sutter Health Park.
And he’s also at work on a new yet-untitled recording. One of its slated six tracks, Neil said, will feature all 100-plus instruments in his arsenal, overdubbed and multitracked in the studio.
Neil’s musical journey has been well documented in recent years on Sacramento-area newscasts; Indian-American and other AAPI media, on social media and his own website. Proud father Rajan provides a stack of newspaper clippings, magazine articles and video snippets of interviews the still-young Neil has conducted over the years.
He has performed the Star-Spangled Banner before Sacramento Kings games and logged a number of TV appearances over the years. He has also tried his hand at film scoring, composing the music and performing on cello for the short film, Lollipop, entered in the annual A Place Called Sacramento Film Festival.
A cherry-red Fender Stratocaster sports an autograph from one of his many fans: First Lady Jill Biden, who met Nayyar during a Bay Area engagement last year.
At the family home tucked into a north Elk Grove cul-de-sac, the instruments of Neil’s journey were laid out in the living room like tools: the guzheng, a Chinese string instrument the length of a grand piano’s keyboard, similar in tone and appearance to the Japanese koto; the medieval hurdy-gurdy, the intricately carved Saraswati veena and the fretless 19-string dobro-like sarod from India.
Cases of instruments lined like breadcrumbs along a hallway led to a rear room where dozens more horns, whistles, woodwinds, percussion, and yet more stringed instruments were tucked away.
“We have a busy house,” Rajan deadpanned.
Neil Nayyar confidently moved from one instrument to the other, plucking bright notes from a harp; coaxing eerie backward-looped churn from the hurdy-gurdy; and strapped on his electric sitar, its vivid paint job recalling guitar hero Eddie Van Halen’s iconic striped axe, to work out a familiar riff: The Beatles’ “Come Together.”
“Music really connects with people — it connects the world,” the Elk Grove teen said, musing on the song’s title. “’Come Together,’ I’ve listened to it 100 times. It gives you joy.”
A child’s drum roll
And it all began with a drum set.
Neil was just 6 when his parents took him to a free drum class sponsored by Elk Grove’s Cosumnes Community Services District. The instructors said the boy played the drums “like an old pro.”
Neil was hooked, but not only on the drums.
“Every instrument was different,” father Rajan said. “Drums, piano, then to flute, to saxophones.”
Trips to music stores with his parents turned into hours-long excursions, so immersed Neil was in their sights and sounds. He would scour the Internet to search for other exotic instruments. By the time Neil was 12, he had learned to play 44 instruments, 107 by age 13, his blooming musical curiosity extending to the sounds and textures of eastern Europe, Africa, Japan, Indonesia and his parents’ India homeland.
“Whenever I bring a new instrument home, I feel like the whole world is in this house,” Neil said. “Each has its own region, its own sound. That’s what I like about all these instruments. It makes me inspired to make music.”
Though there is an element of natural talent at play — Neil plays by ear and is a strong sight-reader — his music also involves much study: dozens of instructors over the years on tabla, guitar, sitar, Latin percussion and other instruments; and a daily 6 to 8-hour practice regimen atop his academic studies and chores.
The home-schooled Nayyar and his parents talk about the joy he finds in the music, the discovery of different instruments and sounds and the immersive experience it has become.
“When I was little, I never had this music (playing) all day,” mother Sukhbinder Kaur said. “We bless God for giving him this talent.”
Music for the soul
Kaur said her son’s music is needed salve in troubled times.
“I see people cry” when they hear Neil play, she said. “He can help the community, spread the love. Music has no language — it’s the language of love. It’s what we need right now. When we go to performances — Vietnamese, Hmong — we feel like part of the group. It brings togetherness and joy, for sure.”
On a recent Saturday, crowds at a bustling Asian American Pacific Islander cultural festival in Elk Grove caught a glimpse of Neil’s talent. He bounded about the outdoor stage stretching out on Indian-inflected rock, unspooling a solo on his bright-red electric sitar.
“He’s good, he seems very passionate and he’s getting the crowd going,” Derrick Morris of Sacramento said as he caught the brief Saturday set. “It definitely shows he loves what he does.”
This story was originally published May 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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