Choral riffs: A Wknd interview with jazz icon Asha Puthli
Hindustan TimesIn 1966, at the restaurant Venice at Hotel Astoria in Bombay, writer Ved Mehta, artist Vivan Sundaram and Asha Puthli turned up to listen to saxophonist Braz Gonsalves’s jazz quintet perform. In his chapter Jazz in Bombay, he would say: “As the musicians play, they throw glances at Asha, who blows kisses to them.” Braz Gonsalves called out to Asha to take to the stage and she did, facing the musicians, her back to the audience. Hammond passed her demo tape on to the avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and Puthli became the first vocalist to record on Coleman’s seminal 1971 work, Science Fiction. Puthli’s self-titled debut album, released in 1973, instead offered a sound that was space-disco, funk and ballad combined, with a fantastic cover of the reclusive JJ Cale’s Right Down Here thrown in.
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Asha Puthli was nearly India’s first disco star. She’s now 79, and her tour’s selling out
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