Against a black-and-white Times Square-esque background, turban-clad men and sari-clad women look on with wide eyes and open mouths as a showstopper bull walks past. And before you know it, four friends sitting on a cot, start singing praises of the bullock cart.
Fun, quirky and funky is how singer Vasuda Sharma describes the sound of her band Sharma and the Besharams. Vasuda’s Mumbai-based band featuring Chaitanya Bhaidkar, Chirayu Vedekar and Sanchit Mhatre, was in the city on Saturday to perform at Bay 146 at the Savera Hotel, as part of a tour celebrating the release of its first original EP BeDesi . Speaking about it, the graduate from the Berklee College of Music says, “The intention with this EP was to do desi music, but with a twist.” The four songs in the EP are ‘Ganga’, ‘Jazbaa’, ‘Bailgaadi’ and ‘Rahiman’. While they fall under the genre of folk pop, each of them has a distinct sound. “Folk is the foundation of our music. I grew up singing folk songs and bhajans. With this as the base we add our own vagaries to it, rearranging it to give it a unique expression. ‘Jazbaa’ is a funky rock song, ‘Ganga’ is a soothing number, ‘Bailgaadi’ has a reggae feel to it and ‘Rahiman’ is a rock punk piece.”
“We love to experiment with our instrumentation.” says Vasuda, adding, “The banjo is a constant in all the four songs and in each we have tried to create a different vibe with it. ‘Ganga’, for example, which is a Bhojpuri folk melody, has a Bhojpuri dholak coupled with a piano solo, Irish-folk violin and banjo.”
Along with these tracks, the band also played numbers from Vasuda’s 2013 solo album Attuned Spirits . The band also played new originals ‘Sarphira’, which has an Afro-Assamese folk inspiration and ‘Aaja Aaja’, a Goan carnival number. “Sharing new originals in live performances is very important to us. It lets us gauge the appeal of the song.” So can we look forward to another EP release soon with the new originals? “We will start working on it early next year. But live performances are our main priority.”
Vasuda was the youngest member of the pop band Aasma before she released her crowd-funded solo debut folk-fusion album Attuned Spirits . She has also composed music for two movies: Shahrukh Bola “Khoobsurat Hai Tu” and The Path of Zarathustra , apart from being a playback singer in Akaash Vani and Diary of a Butterfly .
Driven by the zest to make music that puts its listeners in a light spirit, the jolly vibe in the band’s songs is impossible to miss. “We do not want to create a serious space when we are performing. We express our vibrance through our music, the costumes and sets in our videos and our artwork. We are all about making music fun.”
