Elvis Mark Gabriel

At eight or nine, Elvis believed he could learn the guitar in two days for a school assembly. His father, who knew only three chords, taught him one. The guitar entered his life not as a triumph but as an idea, waiting. Around nineteen, he was asked to fill in as a bassist at church - and bass taught him discipline, time, and how to listen within a larger sound.

Shaped by Guthrie Govan, Mateus Asato, John Mayer, and Derek Trucks, he later moved into film music - a humbling shift into Carnatic and Eastern idioms, made possible by patient peers. Today he writes by feeling: "I try to expand on that feeling. It's very intuitive."