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| Bickram Ghosh and Sonu Nigam at Guchhi, Hyatt Regency. Sonu sang snatches of songs like Jal de and Akhiyan tihari from Jal, Kal ho naa ho and Abhi mujh mein kahin. Jal releases on April 4 |
When one hit the high note the audience went quiet, listening with rapt attention. When the other drummed up a beat, they kept time with their feet. A burst of spontaneous applause greeted the artistes each time. It was quite a jugalbandi as music men Sonu Nigam and Bickram Ghosh wowed a select gathering at Tete-a-Tea on Friday afternoon. Excerpts.
Bickram: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s an absolute pleasure to introduce you to the best lyricist of the country, an incredible harmonica player, a programmer par excellence, a dancer and… a singer. He is the No. 1 singer in the country. He has been for 20 years. How we met? There could be a movie like Jab We Met! Manisha Dey, a dear friend of ours, kept saying we should meet and there would be a synergy. Finally, we met and he sang the song Dhundo for the film Gumshuda (music by Bickram Ghosh, 2010). We met and we chatted for so long that at one point he said, ‘Aap ko gana gawana tha na?’ Subsequently we started working on an album, Khaamakhaan. One day he said, ‘Saath mein film ka music karte hain?’ And Jal came along, set to release on April 4. Now we are working on a film called Happy Anniversary. There’s so much that has happened in the last one-and-a-half years, musically, personally, that I am quite overwhelmed by what is taking place. It has been quite a life-changing association.
Sonu: Thank you for such loving and kind words. I have accepted you in my life as my elder brother. And I am very honoured to know you as a person. It’s been more than 36 years I have been working professionally as a singer. Music has always been a part of my life. Although I was loved by everyone, I was not understood by too many people as a kid. And these are patterns of life. What happens in your childhood repeats itself in your youth and perhaps repeats itself again and again throughout your life until you break that pattern, or accept it. So I accepted it.
To have a Bickram Ghosh as your partner is so enriching, we have shared so much… and this is not some mutual-admiration society. He says things which I have been thinking but had kept to myself… that has to be a very real connection. And we have a sense of humour, we crack jokes, we laugh a lot, but beyond all that masti, there comes a real understanding of each other, understanding of life… music is a state of my mind, which we experience as musicians. To me having like-minded people around is a blessing when you are somehow living in a different world altogether. That is what we have cherished over the years. That’s why the association has been more than just a musical partnership.
Bickram: He has worked with almost everybody on the planet and I have worked with a milieu of people as well and I have never felt, ‘Let me sit and talk to this person’ and in the process forgetting to get him to sing! That actually happened and we ended up finishing the recording at 6 in the morning! We must have chatted for three hours. That has been the pattern of the relationship. There’s one hour of work and four hours of chatting. What we feel as human beings has to be translated in the work. The work we do are who we are… and there has to be a dignity in whatever we do. I’m really glad that what we have achieved so far is already making people sit up and take notice.
Jal has a very eclectic soundtrack. Shubha Mudgal has sung the song, Jal de…. As everybody knows Sonu is an incredible mimic, and he actually mimicked Shubhaji and said, ‘Aap socho this is what the song is going to sound like!’ And I wish Mika Singh was there when he mimicked Mika Singh and sent the track to him… there is a song in Sooper Se Ooper (Sonu and Bickram’s Bolly debut as music directors) that Mika sang. And he said, ‘Let us get Mika to sing the song’, and he sang the song just like Mika, to the extent that some of the producers could not recognise (the voice)…. Then he sent it to Mika exactly like that, and Mika calls back saying, “Arey Sonuji yeh kya hay, aapne toh hamara voice apna karke bheja!”
Sonu: See, we believe there should be enough masti in life. Life should be funny and full of masti. It should be a multi-layered life.
Bickram: Who are your friends, are they primarily artistes or non-artistes?
Sonu: There has been a set of people who have been consistently there.... The people I get along with from the industry are friends like Raju Singh, the composer, Wajid of Sajid-Wajid, and Shantanu Moitra although Moitra has this wall around him!
Bickram: He is not that physical?
Sonu: Yes (laughs)… he is my darling, I love him. We played badminton recently and we beat everybody, we both are good, but I am slightly better! He is a good friend of mine. The rest are all friends, but most of the guys are very filmi… (mimics them) meri jaan kya haal hai, meri muah (blows kisses), for how long can you do this?
Bickram: In the early ’90s when I went to Bombay I used to find it a little intimidating, how people would start talking about your kurta or some accessory and not about your music at the first meeting!
Sonu: Hello, aap ke classical scene mein bhi aise hain.
Bickram: That’s what I am saying. They would go waah waah waah, and kya baat...
Sonu: You know why I get along with him? He’s one classical musician who’s not a classical musician!
Bickram: Thank you! In the classical music field, everybody is competing with everyone else to be a Pandit, which nobody actually bestows upon anybody. There’s also competition as to how many people are touching your feet! So if someone even bends forward before you, they’ll push you down so that you are forced to touch the feet (everyone laughs)! I had such an allergy to the whole Pandit thing… I remember a few years ago there was a CD on which was written Pandit Bickram Ghosh. I have always abhorred the idea of being called Pandit because it doesn’t help my career in any way. Imagine someone calling Rupam, Pandit Rupam Islam! What will he do? He’ll lose his fan following (everyone laughs)! So I remember sitting through the night taking the CD covers out and blackening the word Pandit for 450 CDs.
Coming back to Jal, there are a lot of firsts in the film. The movie is breathtakingly photographic. I don’t think any other film has captured the desert in such reality and beauty. The song, Jal de, is somehow connected to Sonubhai’s mother…
Sonu: I was sitting beside my mother in Bangalore, my mother was getting treated there, she had just been diagnosed with cancer… she passed away last year… at that point we were beginning her treatment. And in Bangalore, I was sitting with her, and the idea for the song struck (hums a few lines from Jal de).
Bickram: The song Akhiyan tihari was probably our biggest challenge in the early days of our association. We were given this extremely challenging job by director Girish Malik of making a song which was in Hindi and English and to put it in a rustic environment. The movie is set in the Rann of Kutch… so how do you create a song which retains its meaning and relevance and still has a classical thumri playing? We got Sonubhai’s guruji Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan to sing the song, all of 82 years old… Sonubhai is a rockstar but at the same time when Ghulam Mustafa Khansaab comes in, he is the classical shishya, and that gives him his huge dimension as an artiste... Akhiyan tihari also has this upcoming and very promising harmonica player ! You have to hear the song. Sonubhai came into the studio very upbeat that day. He had a harmonica with him, and he was playing it… and I was like, ‘You can play this! You go into the studio right now!’ And what a beautiful piece of harmonica he has played.
Sonu: I was just practising actually, I had just bought the harmonica.
Bickram: I’ll tell you about a song (from the album Khaamakhaan). I don’t think any commercial Hindi song has been done in four-and-a-half beats. He came to the studio one day and said, ‘Bickrambhai, ek bhalta rhythm doh.’ I said, ‘How about a four-and-a-half beat one?’ Then we started thinking about the song. So we wanted to come up with the most maverick idea for a song. We were in a loony mood, and we came up with a song where someone has died, and his wife has killed him. He has come back to haunt this person and take revenge. Now he starts writing the lyrics. You have to hear this song, it sounds so crazy!
Sonu: Do you have it here?
Bickram: I don’t have it here, we’ll play it when we are promoting Khaamakhaan.
Sonu: Correct!
WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY
Kaushiki Chakrabarty, vocalist: You are one of those rare Bollywood singers who improvises on stage. Why are you open to the idea of improvisation when most of the other singers prefer not to?
Sonu: I think it has got to do with your personality. There are people who live life by the book. And there are people like us who are ramta-jogi! That’s how I am. I try to improvise, also to challenge myself, at least I am learning something new. Bickram: I think there are two kinds of artistes, one who can and those you can’t!
Sonu: I didn’t say this!
Bickram: And there’s a third kind, those who can but don’t know when to stop.
Partha Desikan, vocalist: You create very intricate work, putting in all that finesse, shiksha and talim. Do you think the common listener is ready to accept that kind of a composition yet, with all those intricacies? Do you care about the listener?
Sonu: I am not intimidated by the listener. You cannot be over-confident of course. You do not alienate them. When I am on stage, I do not overdo it. But I have masti on stage.
Partha: Do you feel the Indian audience is ready to accept something really simple and straightforward?
Bickram: As music directors, what defines what we do is the need of the film. In a film like Jal, there was a need for a song like Jal de, which has a classical bent. But we have a name for our sound. We call it ’muddy electronica’. It has mitti ki khushboo…. Something close to earth, at the same time there are folk and traditional influences... and there is electronica, the sound of today. For people like us, there is the fun of travelling from one end to the other, it gives us a lot of independence. We have a ball making any kind of song. There’s so much diversity. Now we are debating whether we should make a song called Cho cho cho cho (laughs)! My first instinct is I think of my father (Pandit Shankar Ghosh). How will he react when he listens to Cho cho cho cho? He’ll probably think after learning so much, my son’s going cho cho cho (laughs)! But then I also feel this is a challenge. We can lift the song to a different level.
Arindam Sil, actor-director: What is it that brought the two of you together?
Sonu: Both of us are from different cities, backgrounds… one thing we have in common is we have a lot of lihaaz for people. We can only be enraged when someone crosses those boundaries. We both have a lot of patience. At no point do I take him for granted. I am a sucker for tameez. We give that respect and comfort zone to each other.
Sundeep Bhutoria, host for the afternoon: Which are your favourite songs, and one song that someone else has sung?
Sonu: My favourite film song is Abhi mujh mein kahin (from the Hrithik Roshan-starrer Agneepath) and non-film ones are the songs from my album Classically Mild.... And there is this one song which KK has sung really well, and the composition is awesome, it’s Sajde mein yun hi jhukta hoon (from Bachna Ae Haseeno). I love that song.
Text: Arindam Chatterjee
Pictures: Rashbehari Das
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