Vocal delight

The raucous laughter would have disrupted the jazz number, if it weren't for the singer's tenacity to keep going. She had sung through a barroom brawl once and this group of boys and girls didn't seem all that bad. True, the rest of the audience seemed distracted and were glaring at their tables repeatedly. But the young singer on the stage knew it was up to her to hold their interest. She gestured to the bassist and as soon as the song ended, he struck up some bold chords that everyone identified as the opening bars of the new Bollywood hit. The loud laughter from the unruly steadily died down as the suddenly interested girls hushed up the guys. Jazz lost out, but the evening was saved.

It's this kind of versatility that is required to carry a live music evening through in most of Delhi's hotspots and Parvati Krishnan knows it well. Singing professionally since three years and currently part of a Spanish Jazz outfit, it was in the tea gardens of Bengal that her talent was discovered. “I am very grateful to my parents for giving me the opportunity to train my voice even though we've always lived in remote areas,” says Krishnan, who received Hindustani classical vocal training from age five to 15.

Not so for Jasmine Saxena, who is just breaking into the Delhi music circuit. Her singing voice was trained on self-bought Karaoke cassettes, though her talent was discovered in school at age nine. “My first stage performance was when I was in the fourth grade. There was an inter-school music competition and my teacher asked me to sing in the solo category,” says Jasmine, who is half-Filipino. Her break into professional singing came thanks to associations built at Artistes Unlimited (AU) shows. AU is a Delhi-based charitable trust for the promotion of performing arts that holds shows for which singers and musicians collaborate on a project basis.

Discovering one's talent is one thing, and getting paid for it quite another. “One of the difficulties of a career in music, especially Western music, is that it takes time to get established and get a regular flow of income from it,” says Parvati, who manages a balancing act with a job in publishing and growing popularity in the Capital's entertainment circles. Things are not easy most of the time, however. Often, payments are delayed or non-existent. In fact, one has to contend with singing for nothing more than a meal when trying to establish oneself. As more people hear of you, you can start pitching your talent. In this, self-confidence is a must, while networking skills help grow one's scope.

Take Aditi Singh Sharma, who has taken up singing professionally. She has a number on the soundtrack of ‘Dev D’ to her credit and has even been awarded the Mirchi Music Award for it. Aditi started singing in Delhi's niche rock circuit and astounded people by adapting songs originally sung by heavy, male voices, like Marilyn Manson. “When I started, there were few female singers in the Delhi rock scene.  I had to counter being a woman in a male-dominated genre,” says Aditi. But, she says, it's all about how you improvise. She also credits AU for being a platform for building the right sort of connections.


Author: Pankaj Mullick

Date: 6th May, 2010

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