Cabaret to global pop, Asha lived ‘crossover’ before it was buzzword | India News
There are singers of one era, and then there are Asha BhosleOne who behaved for decades as if to overcome trends that he would sink and then overtake A vocal sponge, Bhosley soaked up pop and jazz greats long before the internet made it easy. “I used to watch Carmen Miranda a lot and try to imitate her style,” he said in an interview, “as I later did with Shirley Bassey.“ Dressed in voluminous sarees, Asha Tai who loved to make her signature ‘maa ki dal’ and jaggery kheer was the same woman who watched Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock three times just to nail the phrase ‘Ena Meena Deka’; who received a letter from the Vatican for singing ‘Ave Maria’; and became the first Indian singer to form an overseas pop group in Britain in the 1980s, West India Company. At a time when playback voices in India were still neatly boxed – classical, romantic, devotional – Bhosle was slipping into them. Trained in Hindustani classical music, he said, “If you have the will and the riaz … you can sing anything.” He straddled cabaret, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and global pop long before the industry knew what to call any of it.
Many story twists come with Burmans. SD Burman first showed him how to add his own ‘input’ to a track to make it work, but it all started with RD Burman when the pair would sit up until 4am listening to jazz and rock. When he handed her ‘Aaja Aaja’ for Tishri Manjil, he is said to have jumped at its Western notoriety. It wasn’t a tune you could do like a ghazal. It required breathless phrasing and a loose shoulder. After ten days of rehearsals, she’s so owned by it that it now feels like it’s always been hers. It became a pattern. Be it the smoky, rhythmic breathiness of ‘Piya Tu Ab To Aaja’ or the pop-song ease of ‘Chura Liya Hai’, Bhosle can tune his vocal chords to suit every mood. In the 1990s, when ‘crossover’ became a buzzword, he was already living it. “I told my son Anand, I have sung in almost every Indian language but I have not done English,” he said of his jump to West India Company. It was a leap into the unknown that would have terrified a lesser artist. “Though the music was ready, there was no set tune to sing. I created my own tunes and melodies,” he said of fusing Indian vocals with Western club r-ythms and electronic music. This ability to improvise led him to record ‘Bow Down Mister’ with Boy George, where Indian devotional strains met synth-heavy pop. It could be a gimmick. Instead, it sounds like a natural extension of what he’s done with unaffected ease. At age 64, he stepped into the MTV spotlight. She teamed up with Code Red for the song ‘We Can Make It’ and appeared in a music video, matching the boy band and their R&B groove in her silk saree and alap. Soon after, he appeared with REM’s Michael Stipe on ‘The Way You Dream’ for his project ‘1 Giant Leap’, a track that made its way to Hollywood via the 2003 action-comedy film ‘Bulletproof Monk’. Bhosle never crossed so far from east to west on equal terms. Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Hope’ made him a cultural reference point, later remixed by Fatboy Slim. The Black Eyed Peas sampled her on ‘Don’t Funk With My Heart’, dragging her voice into 2000s hip-hop. Sara Brightman takes ‘Dil Chiz Kya Hai’ to operatic pop. In 2005, Kronos Quartet made an album around him, ‘You’ve Stolen My Heart’. He recorded RD Burman’s classics at such a pace — three to four songs a day — that the quartet struggled to keep up. It earned him a Grammy nomination. Even in later years, he seemed game for unlikely pairings, be it a duet with cricketer Brett Lee to a collaboration with Pakistani pop singer Jawad Ahmed that ignored the politics of the moment. Which brings us to 2026. Bhosle, in his nineties, recording ‘The Shadowy Light’ from his Pedder Road home for British virtual band Gorillaz’s Genre – his voice against a swirl of hip-hop, dub and electronica, mixed with an old harmonium – would be his ultimate combination.
