Asha Puthli: jazz legend comes to Mumbai to spellbind music lovers

Considered jazz “royalty,” Asha Puthli in the world of jazz music is a legend because of her musical legacy in different genres of Western music. One of the originals of “acid jazz” and as a precursor of disco and funk — based in Los Angeles — she returns to Mumbai to cast a spell on music lovers.

On October 19 at the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the legendary singer, actor, model, Asha Puthli cast a spell on her music aficionados and followers in an event organised by Red Bull Music Academy with Mad Boy Band. It was a rare event that saw the crowd going ga ga and wild over her singing. For the present generation of music lovers, she is a legend who rose to great heights in the competitive world of the US, the UK and Europe. Her records have turned gold and young students are doing PhDs on her amazing career. Deepti Datt, a gifted music event manager, has nearly completed the thesis.

I meet her at her brother’s apartment in Bandra. I share with readers my long association with Asha.

Ten years ago, I met her in Los Angeles. Jazz singer, actress, model Asha Puthli had moved from Palm Beach, Florida to Los Angeles. Her apartment was somewhere in West Hollywood near Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood is a part of our lives. Remember Gloria Swanson’s famous movie of the same name? We were on a quiet by-lane at the base of the hill and a small theatre named “Sunset” could be seen from the large window on the left.

What compels me to write this article is the fact that it is rare indeed to find one person who has knowledge of Indian dance and is immersed in Indian culture but is also at par with the best in the West and is equally at home in Western culture.

Very few know that Asha studied Kathak privately when she was studying at the Home Science Faculty at the M.S. University of Baroda in the early sixties, and Bharatnatyam before that with wonderful dancer Saraswati. We met after she returned to Bombay and I suggested that she should study Odissi. I took her to Menaka Thakkar, a disciple of Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, at her Santa Cruz residence and Asha started learning Odissi for some time. The famous film director, the late Mani Kaul has filmed her Odissi Mangalacharan. Asha also appeared on the Span magazine’s cover in Odissi costumes and when we were together in London, she and I used to give lec-dems on Odissi. She often used hand gestures in her performances when singing and she has written several songs which reference Indian motifs.

Her contemporaries during her career as a model were Shobhaa De and Protima Bedi. All of them are legendary figures.

Asha’s interest in classical Indian dance was boundless. The renowed lawyer Indira Jaisingh, Asha and I had travelled together and stayed at Kerala Kala Mandalam watching Kathakali classes way back in 1966. Asha had made a small film with 8 mm camera on Kathakali and Kerala titled The Parasol, Pallanquin and the Drum.

Fond of paintings during her studies at Baroda she was close to renowned papinters Vivan Sunderam, Bhupen Khakhar and Gulam Sheikh.

Hers is a fascinating career. Hailing from a traditional Saraswat Brahmin family, and a niece of Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, raised in Bombay and educated in Baroda, she studied Western music and also classical Hindustani vocals from Lakshman Prasad Jaipurwale. But she was interested in jazz, listening to it on Voice of America, and had dreams of “making it big in the jazz world in America.” She came to New York on a scholarship to study dance at Martha Graham’s school and ended up singing jazz with the legendary Ornette Coleman. She won the Downbeat Magazine Award. Asha’s career reads like a chapter from a novel.

We had planned to meet during my visit to the States as we were at the Carnegie Hall in New York on September 20 for the Dance Festival of India, 2008. She was planning to raise funds for a hospital she was contemplating to build in her father Umanath Puthli’s memory at Tara village, near Panvel, in Maharashtra.

Through Ved Mehta, the New York-based author of Portrait of India, Asha met John Hammond, Sr., the best talent scout who discovered the likes of Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen. Asha’s mentor and great admirer is jazz expert Niranjan Jhaveri who introduced her to the Reverend John Gensel, the pastor of the only jazz church in New York in the early seventies and since then Asha has cut several records of diverse genres — pop, rock and roll, disco, funk, soul and what have you — for EMI, CBS International and some of them went on the charts and went “gold.”

On August 12, 2006 she had appeared on the front page of the New York Times which announced her “first New York city concert in 25 years” on August 13 at the Central Park Summer Stage joined by jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman and the rapper Guru, followed by another appearance at Joe’s Pub, a prestigious and trendy jazz club on September 13. Overnight she was back in the news, and won over a large audience of the old and the new “second” generation.

Jon Pereles wrote in the New York Times: “No one can blame the Indian singer Asha Puthli for a little name dropping. The collaborators and benefactors in her career since the late 1960s include, just for starters, Ornette Coleman, Martha Graham, the Notorious B.I.G, the film makers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and the talent scout John Hammond. She has scandalized India and delighted British talk-show audiences; Embracing many cultures she has been a catalyst in German disco and as an Italian movie actress.”

I had met Asha the previous year in 2005, when I was on a Fulbright fellowship and visiting New York, after my lecture at Philadelphia to attend Aditi Mangaldas’s performance at The Asia Society. She told me an interesting story about how all this happened. Jason King, a young professor of music at the Tisch School at New York University, who was doing a book for Duke University and wanted to write a chapter on her and refer to “soul music,” interviewed her and put her in touch with DJ Spooky. From that meeting, things began to move and resulted in the Central Park event. The comments from the New York Times catapulted her once again into the world of music and she is busy recording her new album. To sum up Asha’s achievements, The New York Times wrote: “...an extraordinary voice. Ms Puthli has a velvety lower register that recalls Billie Holiday. From there, she can leap up an octave or two into a clear, secure soprano.”

For Indian music aficionados, Asha’s music is still ahead of her times. But one feels proud that from India, Asha had made it in this extremely competitive world in America. However, she had a more successful career in Europe, specially in Germany, Italy, France and the UK. After her performance at the Central Park in New York, Asha had also received a Life Time Achievement Award in the Bollywood Music Awards category in 2006 at Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Reams have been written about her. Described as, “Singer Asha Puthli, the groovy vixen whose voice lent a psychedelic, swinging vibe at many a bachelor pad in her heyday in the 70’s, made a come back at a recent concert at Central Park Summer Stage followed by a gig at the trendy Joe’s Pub.” Her greatest-hits album is Space Talk: The best of Asha Puthli, the CBS Years, and features smoldering hits like I Dig Love.

I met her friends in Hollywood. They all agreed that she needs a music manager. Through the internet, her old records are downloaded and the “second generation” has discovered her with a large following. They had no doubt that with her celebrity status, rubbing shoulders with celebrities in the world of fashion designers, painters, musicians, actors, film directors, socialites, she had carved a fantastic career with such a “God-given” voice. The legendary painter Andy Warhol, who photographed Asha and was a friend of hers, has his former friends in the media in Hollywood. They appreciated the fact that she dropped out of a busy career to raise her son Jannu for over a decade. Brad Pitt and Angelina, the Hollywood stars, when they went to India for shooting and met the Maharaja of Jaipur (known as Bubbles to friends) were given a set of records of Asha which they loved.

Asha is a versatile artiste and knows how to charm her audiences and media. Her quotes from press interviews have become popular: Way before the word globalization was coined — she had said, “I feel like a global person. My psyche, I think, is very American. My soul and my roots are very Indian. And my career has been more European.”

“I am spiritually 6000, I am mentally 98, I am emotionally 5 and chronologically in between.”

“I am an artist, and it is difficult for artists to draw lines. We draw circles — concentric and eccentric circles.”

Asha’s music from the 70’s and 80’s have been sampled and resampled by major hip hop and rap artists like P. Diddy, 50 Cent, Diplo, Jay Z, the Neptunes and others on the A-List.

At present, her son Jannu has set up an organisation APMP and this has renewed interest in her music and singing, creating an unprecedented demand for her records in the music world. For those of you who would like to experience her velvety and versatile voice, check it out on iTunes or YouTube.

 In 2014, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles exhibited costumes and albums of the two leading musicians from India: Pandit Ravi Shankar and Asha Puthli. This was followed up by a proclamation from the city of Los Angeles, at the City Hall. Also, the same year, Asha’s contribution to American music was included in an exhibit titled “Beyond Bollywood — Indian Americans who changed the Nation”. This exhibit travelled after some years at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington D.C.

Initially, Red Bull Music Academy had invited Asha to give a lecture to a young generation of musicians. This was nothing new to her as she has been giving lectures covering different aspects of the music industry over the years.

Soon after the lecture with Red Bull Academy was green lighted, Asha came across an article on Madboy and Mink where the young musician Imaad Shah cited her as being an influence on his music, and thus the idea of collaborating with a young band came about.

The recent event has created great excitement and Asha, Jannu and Deepti Dutt have no doubt that for the new generation, her contribution to music would extend their horizons.

The writer is an eminent dance historian