Four fast friends… a smorgasbord of ideas, styles and sounds… one dream – Rijk.
Rijk (pronounced Ryk) is the culmination of a commitment to music – a four piece instrumental band starring Rodney Jayaraj, Isaac Dharmakumar, John Praveen and Keba Jeremiah.

How did we come to be called Rijk? Because our initials just happen to make up the Dutch word for ‘rich’! But no…. while trying to come up with the perfect moniker for our band, Rodney fiddled around with our names and arrived at the word Rijk (quite an Nsync move, although Rod was completely oblivious to this fact). When we discovered what it meant, we decided to keep it – whoever said quirky and meaningful don’t go together?! Rijk…. is rich. We want to make our music that way – rich in quality, sound and meaning.

Rijk is a dream we’ve had for a while now – to merge our individual experiences and perspectives and do what we do best. No prizes for guessing what that might be. All of us have our roots in Christian music…We started off by playing at different churches and various Christian concerts, and our hearts remain there. As musicians, each one of us has branched out individually, seeing success in our collaborations with artists both in the Christian music scene as well as the secular industry.
The story of Rijk began through some of those collaborations – the four of us met at gigs and concerts and went from being musicians who worked together, to friends who count on each other, and share similar interests both musically and otherwise. While hanging out, jamming when time permitted, we came up with the idea for a mostly-instrumental band that would showcase a wide range of genres – Smooth Jazz, some Electronica, Gospel, some Latin sounds… anything really. We like to believe that what makes Rijk click is that we are not confined by genre, that we revel in ‘possibility’, in pursuing anything that challenges and intrigues us.

What we’re saying is this – we hope you’ll enjoy our renditions of ‘possibility’, of ‘perspective’; our definitions of ‘sound’ and ‘meaning’ and start believing that our music really…. IS…. RIJK. Welcome aboard our musical journey.