Music
Watch: Indian jazz-pop legend Asha Puthli recounts her incredible journey
The remarkable multi-genre musician from Mumbai, who continues to inspire international artists with her artistry and persona, discusses her incredible life and career.
The extraordinary life of Asha Puthli – the singer, songwriter and actress who grew up in Mumbai – is the subject of the first-ever Red Bull Music Academy lecture from India.
Asha’s incredible career spans five decades and multiple continents. Her single-minded determination to make it as a singer took her from her hometown of Mumbai to New York City as a young girl, as well as to European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, in an era when Indian citizens could not even travel freely as tourists.
She became a superstar at a time when racial and gender discrimination were rampant. Freddy Mercury of Queen was the only other Indian on the international stage, and he changed his name and disguised his origins, something Asha refused to do. Her distinctive singing, as well as personal and performance style had a profound influence on other legendary artists who came across her, such as Donna Summer and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. Booker prize-winner Salman Rushdie’s novel Ground Beneath Her Feet also seems heavily influenced by incidents from Asha’s life.
The trajectory of Asha’s surreal career has taken her from award-winning avant-garde jazz vocalist to international pop star to space disco icon, and further on to electronic and hip-hop music. She has another jazz album currently in the works.
Watch the Red Bull Music Academy lecture in full above and read on for some of the major highlights of Asha Puthli’s exceptional life.
Ornette Coleman & Asha Puthli record in the USA: a major turning point in music
The album Science Fiction was the first time Ornette Coleman – known as the father of the highly improvisational style of free-form jazz – worked with a vocalist. Science Fiction represented a break with the jazz tradition that had existed up until then and marked the advent of a more avant-garde style of jazz music. The now-legendary album went on to win the Deadbeat prize. Asha was on two tracks in the album, for which she was nominated in the jazz vocalist category in the polls. She recalls her disbelief: “Much to my surprise, I was in a tie-in with my idol, Ella Fitzgerald. There, in one breath, Asha Puthli, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Ella Fitzgerald!”
She is one of the earliest examples of a crossover, globalized artist.
Coming from Mumbai, India as a young girl, Asha’s journey took her to New York first, and then across various countries in Europe. After being suspended by CBS London for being pregnant, Asha had to complete her second album in three different countries, and with three different producers. She epitomized globalization before the word existed as a mainstream concept. She recorded in France and Germany, shot in Italy, was signed to a European label, and also did work in America. Speaking about how unusual this was at the time, she says, “Yes, The Rolling Stones would go to Jamaica and record, but then they were one British group going to Jamaica, [to do] the whole thing. Here, different people from different countries were involved.”
Asha Puthli
© Ali Bharmal
Donna Summer took much of her style from Asha Puthli
Donna Summer developed her famously sensual, space-disco style of singing after exposure to Asha Puthli’s performances in Germany in the early 1970s; the influence is evident if one examines her style before and after she came across Asha. Prior to this, Donna was, as Asha puts it “belting out songs”. Asha’s specific style of singing owed much to the Jaipur gharana (school) of Hindustani classical music, which is a closed-throat and somewhat subdued style of singing. This soft, slinky, intergalactic style then went on to be known as the Munich sound in disco. Backstage at one of her shows, Donna Summer even asked Asha where her custom-made dress was from and contacted the designer, Bill Gibb, to make her the same thing, which he refused to do. “A lot of people say that this album [The Devil Is Loose] and the other album are templates that later on Donna Summer, Pete Bellotte, Georgio Moroder all ripped off from my sound. Now, remember I’ve mentioned to you that I was suspended because I was pregnant. So at that time was when they jumped on the bandwagon, apparently. This is what I’m told by people in Germany, in the industry. Because when they called me up they said, ‘We want to work with the real McCoy,” says Asha.
Her music was supressed by CBS London when she was pregnant
Unbeknownst to her, Asha’s label CBS London had received a letter from the British home office saying that she was not allowed to legally work in the country. Asha’s pregnancy came as a boon to the label who then had a reason to suspend her. In the 1970s, maternity leave was not recognized as a right for working women. This was an easy way for CBS to get out of giving her the escalating royalties they had promised her and allowed other artists such as Donna Summer, whose music could be released without any issue, the space to copy Asha’s style and earn recognition for it. In Germany, the head of CBS Schallplatten told Asha that CBS London had effectively destroyed her career by not releasing her albums and sitting on her music, similar to what they did with Aretha Franklin.
Asha with Deepti Datt during the Red Bull Music Academy lecture
© Ali Bharmal
Legendary music business veteran John Hammond read about her in a book
While still in Mumbai, Asha had become an air hostess as the job promised her a passport in an era when Indians could not easily obtain one, rendering travel abroad an impossibility. After auditioning in New York for Martha Graham’s dance company, she subsequently moved to America, seeing dance as a means to her ultimate end of becoming a singer abroad. While there, she tried to reach legendary music-business veteran John Hammond, who had played a crucial role in the careers of artists such as Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. In a weird twist of fate, Hammond read about her in the ‘Jazz in Bombay’ chapter of a book called ‘Portrait of India’ and asked the author to put him in touch with the singer, unaware that she had been trying to reach him for the last six months herself. That was how Asha landed up at his office with her tape of classical Indian and jazz music.
She became popular in the UK after singing on a popular television show
Despite the success of Science Fiction with Ornette Coleman, Asha was not considered an artist that labels wanted to sign. She was seen as a serious jazz artist, not a commercially-viable one. This changed when she was invited onto a popular British television show, where she sang a jazz/pop song, My Man, which was much more relatable for mainstream audiences than her previous work. She remembers the chaos that ensued after this. “The next day I had EMI, Polygram, CBS, everyone bidding. It was like a bidding war, and London Times called, ‘Oh, we want a double spread with David Bailey taking the pictures.’ Literally overnight, with very little effort, I got a record deal,” she recalls.
The Red Bull Music Academy lecture was held in Mumbai's G5A Foundation
© Ali Bharmal
In 2009, Asha’s music was transmitted into deep space
Asha’s music reached the vast expanse of outer space in 2009, when the Goonhilly British Satellite Earth Station transmitted her songs in deep space to mark the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. It is a fitting tribute for a singer whose work has been described as “a form of free-floating, ultra-sexualized intergalactic disco that matched hyperventilating time with erotic electronics and surreal sonic environments. Puthli has gone so far out that she has space walked into inner space.” She has called herself an alien, an extra-terrestrial being from outer-space, a space-cadet. She talks about having an out-of-body experience “… and certain other experiences which made me feel that there has to be a function to music, where you can maybe use it as a healing process, maybe use it for defence. In Indian classical music there are such things, like when we hear stories about breaking glass with a voice, right? There’s so many other things that music can do, not just entertain, but that’s also a form of healing.”
She negotiated the same amount of royalties as The Beatles, a rarity in the music industry
Following the bidding war that ensued after she appeared on British television, Asha was able to negotiate with CBS for escalating royalties up to 14%, something very few artists at the time were able to. Only music legends like The Beatles were able to command such high percentages at the time. After being suspended in the UK because of her pregnancy, her management sent her off to Germany to work, following in the footsteps of The Beatles who had gone to Hamburg.
Some of hip-hop's greatest musicians have sampled her music
Asha’s music has been kept alive by stars of the hip-hop world. 50 Cent sampled her song ‘Space Talk’ on his track The World feat. Governor. ‘Space Talk’ had also been sampled by P. Diddy and Notorious BIG. Jay Z and Diplo are among the other contemporary artists to have sampled Asha’s music. She sees this as giving her music a new lease of life. “They gave me a renewed life with my music, with all the sampling, remixing. There are a lot of young people who have taken that same song and then remixed and re-mashed it, and this and that. And, I’m very grateful for that. So I don’t mind if they take it, you know.” Asha has also recently finished up a new solo jazz album, which is a tribute to all the jazz greats she worked with, including Duke Ellington, Cy Coleman, Ornette Coleman and Lionel Hampton.
Click here to read the complete transcript of Asha Puthli's Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Mumbai.
