The Score Magazine - Archive February 2015 issue! | Page 13

When did your interest in playback singing begin? Who were some of the music directors that you were inspired by initially as a youngster? Difficult to say when exactly I may have gotten interested in music. From all the tales that I have been told about years of growing up in the mountain state of Himachal, where my parents lived, I was always singing. From age 3, maybe even younger, my parents remember they would always find me singing and always see me walking around with a stick. I can’t explain the stick now but I surely can explain the singing from back then. Beyond that, I would believe, music was an interest right from childhood because of my grandfather, Rana Krishna Singh, who was an acclaimed thumri singer of his times. In fact, his singing was legendary and people in my native place, Nahan (Himachal Pradesh) still remember his robust gayaki. As a child I would hear him sing at mehfils at home meant strictly-for-like-minded- friends. My grandfather was a proud Rajput zamindar and would not have any outsider hear him sing ever. It was too much for his Rajputi pride to bear, considering those were the days when singing wasn’t exactly considered the right thing to do. Singing was confined to people who di d it for a living. And macho Rajput men from the hilly region weren’t supposed to do it. These private sessions of my grandfather were what I as a child of the family was privy to. Perhaps that sub-consciously left a mark on me. It imprinted my soul and mind in manner that I was possessed for life. I couldn’t resist music no matter where I went. I would find myself especially attracted to folk musicians I would encounter on my travels through Himachal with my parents. My father was employed with the government and would be posted in remote corners of the state. That gave me an opportunity to travel throughout Himachal Pradesh and catch nuances of Himachali folk music. As a child, these glorious sounds caught and gripped my imagination. The crispy folk notes of the upper Himachal region is hard to forget. They have stayed with me for life. And I believe that’s where my interest in music began. On a later stage, the same interest was honed by the spool tapes that my Uncle, who worked as a Pilot with Air India in the early 70s, brought home from the world over. As a school going boy, spool tapes of Beatles, Simon Garfunkel, J J Cale, Frank Sinatara and others fired my imagination. I’ve had huge musical influences in terms of composers but if we are strictly talking about Indian film composers then, S D Burman, R D Burman, Shankar Jaikishen, Laxmikant Pyarelal, Salil Chaudhary, Naushad saheb have been terrific. What's the story behind Silk Route? Story behind Silk Route is simply put a chance meeting of travellers who loved music, discovered they were like-minded, met up for impromptu jam sessions and then stuck around together to make music that each one of us loved individually and collectively. A little after I finished college, an MSc in Geology from Dharamshala, I set out with my guitar to travel all over the mountain state. On a night stop in Mandi, someone told me that a guy in town called Atul Mittal played the guitar and could be found at a petrol station run by his family in the town. So, for the heck of Story behind Silk Route is it, one morning I went to the petrol pump to meet simply put a chance meeting Atul who said he’d be able of travellers who loved music, to see me in the evening discovered they were like- for a jam sessions after minded, met up for impromptu the station shut. We met that evening, jammed and jam sessions and then stuck loved it and did not stop around together. playing together for as long as the band existed. It helped that both Atul and I were from Himachal and that gave us enough reasons to travel to distant places in the state and stay there for days, just jamming. A whole lot of music happened on those travels. In mid 90s when I came down to Delhi and started work on some advertising, jingle assignments, someone introduced me to Kem Trivedi, another brilliant musician who had trained himself in London. Kem’s sense of music was crazy and though very different from Atul and my music, it melted and mingled into ours, making it a sound that had never been heard before in the Indian music scene. So Kem hopped on and we formed Silk Route. It was name suggested by the wife of our first manager, Paramjit Singh, inspired from some reading she was doing while we were debating about what the band should be named. Kenny Puri, our drummer with Silk Route was the last one to join. The group stayed that way for a long long time before as thinking individuals, everyone thought of going there separate ways. The Score Magazine www.thescoremagazine.com 11