Karsh Kale never hits the snooze button because the 42-year-old Indian-American producer-composer and a pioneering figure of the Asian Underground movement is always on the road. So, it was worth the wait for his new album, UP, to release. And who got to hear some of its tracks first? Students of The National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) at Outlawed, presented by Union Bank of India in association with The Telegraph-YOU, on February 5. Post-gig, the man who has worked with Sting, Herbie Hancock, Anoushka Shankar, Alicia Keys and Norah Jones, chatted with t2.

Welcome back to Calcutta. Is it a special place for you?

Calcutta is probably one of the cultural capitals of the country. One could feel it whenever I have done classical shows, fusion concerts and DJ sets, and it has always been a great, receptive audience. They have a respect for all forms of music and arts, be it dance, music, theatre... of even DJs. Calcutta has always been a hub of culture.

What was the starting point for your new album, UP? What binds it and distinguishes it from your repertoire?

After Cinema (2010) had been out for a year, I started to think about new music and how I wanted to release that music. It wasn’t an album right away. It was actually just individual pieces of music and I was working with a lot of different ensembles which all fell into the banner of the Karsh Kale Collective. What binds the album together is me and I kind of see myself as the creator of a landscape of a play and all these different characters keep coming in and out of the story. That’s the common thread to all my work. I put all this together in a context, my own context. 

What distinguishes it, that it’s the first time I have taken this long between album cycles! I did a lot of different things in between. Getting older, getting wiser, getting better as a musician, a better writer… you become better at letting go of the trappings of being an artiste, and you finally see things a lot clearer.

The Asian Underground movement. Where’s it headed?

Well, it definitely isn’t underground anymore. The great thing was that the scene in the ’90s and early 2000s was created by artistes who were diverse in their approaches. So all those artistes have now evolved beyond the club, DJ world we all came from.  

You are playing at a college fest... what were your school and college days like?

School and college happened in New York City, so it was about being able to simultaneously learn as a musician. I interned at a lot of studios, worked at EMI Records. I worked for a classical composer for a while, studied with a tabla teacher for a while… I got to do a lot of different things in college. It wasn’t a conventional college story because half of my education was in New York. The city provided me with a tremendous education and opportunity.

Was there a teacher who inspired you greatly?

There wasn’t a particular music teacher but definitely people I look up to as artistes, like Peter Gabriel and Zakir Hussain.... I’m not just a fan of their music. I have studied how they’ve gone about creating the musical universes that they have. I have been really inspired by how they changed what needed to be changed. That’s the most amazing thing I have learnt from any artiste, that when 10,000 people are looking at you as if you’re doing something wrong, you need to have the courage to go your own way.  

Do you feel guilty about spending chunks of time away from your family?

Every time I leave. That’s the other story of my life.