Everybody Needs a Bosom for a Pillow

By Elest Ali

If you’re someone who still doesn’t know how the only Bollywood film you’ve ever attempted to watch ended, you probably would have felt a bit left out as a 70 something-year-old woman mounted the stage on the evening of October 7. As it would happen, this was the night the Barbican London presented India Calling: Songs from R. D. Burman's Bollywood by the Kronos Quartet featuring Asha Bhosle.

If you’re like me, the absurd title of this article will start to make sense when I remind you of the lines: ‘Brimful of Asha on the 45’ and something more about ‘Asha Bhosle keeping the dream alive behind those movie screens’ by the band Cornershop. A week before my only familiarity with the Indian diva amounted to this enlightened recollection of the name (while enduring friends singing the above lyrics over Haagen Daz ice cream).

First, backtrack to the morning before to my meeting with Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington. Kronos have worked with countless artists over the years, collaborated with some of the most diverse composers worldwide, and have just been generally very widely inspired and fearlessly explorative between genres, cultures and geographic situations. Their devotion to expanding the context of the string quartet has fuelled their extraordinary creativity and produced some of the greatest ensemble work of our time.

When I ask him (out of a curiosity for what kind of sounds will be shaping his next bout of inspiration) about the music he has on his current iPod playlist, David says he doesn’t own an iPod. He does however, admit to being totally Avant Garde, by making a point to listen to music from all countries the American government has been needling thus far. The plan is hopefully a cultural-and-national-awareness-through-music concert (David called it Alternative Radio) in New York early next year.

Currently on tour now, Kronos Quartet’s aforementioned Friday night concert at the Barbican was a tribute to one of India’s most influential Bollywood composers and late husband of Bhosle, Rahul Dev Burman. The performance highlights songs from Kronos and Asha Bhosle’s album, released last year, entitled You’ve Stolen my Heart: Songs from R. D. Burman’s Bollywood. When I ask him the day before the big event about the work of the great Indian artist otherwise unknown in the West (at our own loss), David says he’d first been “struck by the amazing melodies and instrumental colours of Burman’s music” 15 years ago.

For David, R.D. Burman is as good a composer as Debussy or Stravinsky or any such esteemed musical genius of the West. “When I first heard his music I’d never seen a Bollywood film. I didn’t even know what Bollywood was”, and he insists that the original context that much of the filmi (filmi being short for filmi sangeet or film song) composer’s music was created for, doesn’t have to be the only context it can be heard in. With the album (a project they’d been working on for 6 years) and the concert offering occasion and opportunity, Kronos want to give audiences, familiar and unfamiliar with Burman’s Bollywood a sense of him as a composer, orchestrator and creative genius.

This is Kronos’ first ever performance of album songs and to make it possible, Asha Bhosle is not only their first ever lead singer, but their primary contact to Burman as a person and creative force. When asked about working with the Indian maestro’s wife and muse, known to her fans as Ashaji, David has lots of fond anecdotes to recall. “Not only is her voice iconic of an entire world of films,” he says, reminiscing with great delight how she sang down the line to him during their first telephone conversation, “but she has the largest vocal vocabulary I’ve ever heard.”

Moving forward again to the night of the concert with Ashaji now on stage, mind you, any doubts I may still have had in regards to Bollywood music were no more once Kronos had performed two of Burman’s songs before the intermission. But I was in for a bigger surprise when she began to sing.
Before that though, she wanted to shake off some of her nervousness. She began relating in sweet broken English and with some mock pretension, how in the past she’d have an orchestra of a hundred musicians accompanying her and her initial reservation in regards to working with a string quartet, when she was informed, after enquiring the size of the orchestra, that quartet apparently meant only four musicians. Of course, all such reservations dissipated in time and before their first piece, Asha Bhosle proudly re-introduced to what was now her audience, the quartet who could “make the sound of a hundred musicians.” Bless her.

High Light text about Asha B.:
“Not only is her voice iconic of an entire world of films, she has the largest vocal vocabulary I’ve ever heard”