Travel Work Play And Love

Their music is inescapable. Within a span of few years, Adil & Vasundhara have catapulted into the spotlight, charming and garnering a spectrum of loyalists. Their sound is a playful mélange of jazz, funk, Gospel, Blues and RnB, which caters to the eclectic tastes of audiences worldwide. Ampersand, their debut album, is set to release in September this year, which features collaborations with a gamut of musicians such as Louiz Banks, Ranjit Barot, Sanjay Divecha and Sankarshan Kini.

They have performed at various music festivals across the globe, including Féstival Tout Le Monde Chante (France), Festival Corne d’Or in Istanbul (Turkey) and Centre Mandapa in Paris (France). We caught up with Vasundhara who gears up to perform at blueFROG, Mumbai tomorrow.

What can we look forward to from your performance tomorrow? We will be playing all our new material from our debut album, Ampersand. We released a short EP two years ago, but this time we are coming out with a full-length album that we have recorded at Yash Raj Films, with none other than Shantanu Hudlikar. What you will hear at blueFROG will be exactly what we have been up to many hours a day for the past many months.

What’s the story behind Ampersand? When you hear the album, you will see that though on each track you can hear the sound of Adil & Vasundhara, each song is a world away from the other. The stories are the stories of our lives, about our decision to do music, about Delhi’s huge refugee settlements, about travel and work and play and love. There are scores of people who have stepped in at various points to shape the sound of the album and to make the album at all possible. Then, there is the number of ethnicities and contexts involved – the range of timelines and influences on our songs. Keeping in mind the thematic, linguistic, ethnic and generic spectrum that has built itself into the sound of this album, if there was ONE word to describe this project, it had to be Ampersand.

Favourite track from the album? We especially enjoy playing, Pinocchio Times. It’s about the point in life when one has to choose between taking up a 9 to 5 and roughing it out and sticking by one’s art. Ranjit Barot has played on this song in the album. It’s sounding super!

What’s next? Well, our hands are quite full with the album work already, but there are new ideas and some material is beginning to take shape! We are also working on a bi-lingual project so I’ll be revising a lot of French. We are also stepping out to Singapore and Malaysia for a few shows in June._

Catch Adil & Vasundhara live at blueFrog, Mumbai on 24th May, 9:30 pm.

By: Radhika Iyengar
(Follow me on twitter @ radziyengar)