Meeting Asha Puthli: “I have a four-octave range from my classical training and I just went for it, this spaced-out singing”

Mumbai-born singer, actress and global jazz icon Asha Puthli, 79, has lived a life worthy of several biopics. The daughter of Hindu parents from the Saraswat Brahmin caste, she attended an English-speaking school, trained in Indian classical singing and opera, then studied home economics at university before switching on the radio station Voice of America and going mad for jazz. “I wanted to combine Indian classical music with American jazz and form a third-stream music,” says this prototype fusionist from her base in Miami. “Luckily the planets were aligned with my thoughts.”

This was the late 1960s. The Beatles were vibing with the Maharishi. But a brown woman performing avant-garde jazz? That just wasn’t a thing. That is, until it became ‘Asha’s Thing’ – which is how legendary US producer (and civil rights activist) John Hammond, then head of Columbia music, labelled the four-track EP he was touting to label heads from Puthli, who had arrived in New York after a brief stint as an air stewardess, then on a scholarship with the choreographer Martha Graham (“There were no scholarships for jazz so I went backstage, told her I’d studied Indian classical dance and could combine that into jazz modern dance and I auditioned and got in. It was a means to an end”).

Backstage at Summerstage Central Park, New York City, US with Ornette Coleman, 2006

Puthli would go on to release ten albums, 25 singles and make numerous outré guest appearances on albums by the likes of Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton; a jazz and disco icon with a social circle that included Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger, she released a self-titled debut in 1973 and won critical acclaim with 1976’s The Devil is Loose, particularly for the ethereal ‘Space Talk’. The queen of comebacks, she’s been sampled by everyone from Jay-Z to 50 Cent and found favour with UK tastemaker Gilles Peterson; this year she plays festivals including Glastonbury and We Out Here. None of which would have happened were it not for her big break: Puthli and her malleable but just-so vocals feature on Science Fiction, the cult 1972 album by free jazz icon Ornette Coleman.

“So, I’d recorded these four tracks mixing Indian classical music and jazz for John Hammond, and he rang Clive Davis who was looking for a singer for Ornette,” remembers Puthli. “Clive had wanted Gina Raven… Ornette’s music was a form of free-form jazz, a totally different kind of jazz music, a form called ‘harmolodics.’ John just told me to go into the studio and try out because he said I could sing anything… People from Rolling Stone and DownBeat were there, all backstage looking to see if I could sing over the music of this great man. What I had to do was all very improvised. But you know, I had such a bond with Ornette, he was an incredible person. I felt very free, holding my strength and creativity but also at one with sharing and being cohesive. His musicians were amazing. I sang on two tracks, ‘What Reason Could I Give’ and ‘All My Life’; Ornette had this concept of Black future music as a way of projecting the centre of gravity almost outside the music.”

“I have a four-octave range from my classical training and I just went for it, this spaced-out singing. I really felt an affinity between Indian classical forms and jazz. The whole thing was about the improvisation. The minor chords, the free form, the liberalness about the art. Also, that it came from a repressed people, from the Black American experience. I think deep down I related because women were also repressed creatures. Not that I ever felt I was being held back in any way; I just went against what was expected of me. I was probably meant to have an arranged marriage as happens in Indian families but I heard that jazz music on the radio and I knew I had to do something bigger with my life. I ended up following my dream to move to New York and playing with the best, as in Ornette, but it was only after I went to the UK that I got a recording contract after appearing on a TV show called Russell Harty Plus. I took my American influences and recorded a number of covers that I made my own, with a number of different UK producers and musicians. I loved the whole Swinging London thing, Carnaby Street, Kings Road. The clothes! I used to wear mini saris or dress like a man in a French suit, carrying a cigar for fun. I owe a lot to Ornette, who was a truth-teller. Sometimes, when we were talking, there was so much purity in his thoughts that a tear would come to my eye.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today