Pralay Bakshi’s music is all about fusing the melodic structures of the ghazal with more accessible lyrics and a western touch Danuska Da Gama | NT BUZZ
Pralay Bakshi’s music is soulful and melodious. It will make you snap your fingers to the beat as you are transported back to the yesteryears, but with an element of
surprise.
And indeed, Bakshi tells us that he calls his genre ‘Urban Ghazal’, where he attempts to fuse the melodic structures of the ghazal format with more accessible lyrics and western style production (with Indian elements).
“If one looks at the large number of oldie recreations, and the huge popularity of older Hindi music and 90s Indipop even today, one will realise that there is something special and memorable about that kind of music, which still has relevance and resonance with today’s audience, if presented the right way,” says the musician who has released three singles so far – ‘Aashiyana’, ‘Jaane Kyon’, and ‘Mustafa’. He was also recently featured on a popular radio station across 36 cities.
Most of his songs were penned years ago. “‘Jaane Kyon’, is from about 2000. I am still playing around with some new material, but the priority is getting some of these songs out first,” he says.
Bakshi tells us that he’s always been a prolific singer on the inter-collegiate circuit and later the orchestra circuit in Mumbai in the mid-90s. After moving back from London where he went to pursue academics, he did attempt to break into the Indipop scene with a set of originals, but the industry went through a severe crash, and even though he has an album deal, things didn’t work out.
Fast forward and in ten years he moved from jingles, to radio jockeying to running radio stations in Mumbai, UAE, London, Delhi, and Kolkata, to working as a well-recognised voice-over artist. In all this, his music remained on the back burner.
But his years in radio taught him that familiarity works. “People are most likely to stay tuned to songs they have heard before. Remove the non-exciting part from these songs – the way they are played, and replace them with something else, and you have a format that merges familiarity with surprise and freshness.” He goes on to add that the similar experiment has worked with jazz music that now appeals to a larger audience than
before.
And this is how he got the idea of doing the same with retro Bollywood numbers. Everyone, he says, loves the melodies of those decades, be it the Kishore-Rafi-Mukesh era or the 90s. “But it is not exciting to listen to the songs being performed the way they were originally arranged – one has heard them thousands of times, and the sound is dated and typical. Orchestras that play straight covers simply don’t appeal to a wider audience,” he says.
His band Groove Dakshina (comprising also of Sammer Kapadi on percussion and Brian Colaco on keyboards) thus plays groovy western covers of big Bollywood hits. While the initial focus was jazz and reggae, they then transitioned to more energetic formats like rock and Latin, while retaining older styles. “It gives us more variety and flexibility to work around the audience for different gigs. I would say we are much more versatile now,” says Bakshi, who can’t wait to get back to performing before a live audience.
“In a live situation, you are focused more on connecting with the audience and delivering an exciting experience – it gives you more freedom to let go, knowing that minor mistakes don’t really matter. You can experiment more, and involve the audience in your journey,” he says. “A listener who listens to your studio recorded song is not a part of the journey, as only the final cut is accessed.”
And with more and more people getting into songwriting, singing, etc, Bakshi, who also manages the business side of Bina Punjabi Hair Studio since 2011, states that indeed there are no entry barriers, but what’s really important is the ability to judge one’s own talent and being able to benchmark it with industry standards.