Indiecision: Music Blog: Independent Music in India and Elsewhere

INTERVIEW: THE RAGHU DIXIT PROJECT

The Raghu Dixit Project recently completed a mini world tour, travelling to four countries and playing sold out shows to new audiences. I spoke to Gaurav Vaz (bass) about the band’s experiences abroad.

Over the last couple of years The Raghu Dixit Project has become one of India’s premier independent music acts. From the release of their eponymous debut album, to a string of big venue, outdoor shows, the band has fast become one of the freshest properties in the Indian music scene. This success and some hard work by the band’s record label (a Vishal-Shekhar project supported by Counter Culture Records) culminated in a four nation (Hong Kong, Russia, Japan, South Korea) tour organized by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR).

I phoned the very amiable Gaurav Vaz.

What were your first feelings when you returned to India?
Well, I didn’t really want to. It was really good fun; this is what a travelling musician really dreams of doing. This is the second time we’ve been on a tour like this, but only the first time abroad. The first time was in the North-East of India when we sat in a tour bus and went, so that was even more hardcore than this.

Take the jump for the full interview.

How was the experience of playing in many countries, and representing Indian contemporary music there?
It’s a completely exhilarating experience; you stay in a country for five days where you do three shows, and spend the rest of the day travelling and meeting new people. Our music isn’t really ‘western’ in the true sense of the term. It isn’t really English rock which people identify with directly. There was a certain stigma that we had attached to the ICCR label. We’re one of the first contemporary music acts from India to represent Indian outside the country in such a way. Most of the festivals we played were ‘India’ festivals and since we were an ICCR artist, everyone expected us to be of the Bhimsen Joshi genre of acts.

In one way, it put a little extra pressure on us, because we were being judged by the same standards that those audiences had seen from Indian artists. On the other hand, we were an act that was completely different from what they had seen before and that played to our advantage because they had nothing to compare us with. In a few places we could actually make out the people who had come to watch a more traditional show; they were the people in shawls and were sitting down, when we wanted people to jump with us. They had come expecting something, but when you give them a good show of something different, it’s a really nice feeling for us.

What was your most memorable experience of the tour?
There were quite a few actually. But something that really stuck was the way we got people to sing our songs with us. Raghu was quite adamant that he would make them sing with us. So he taught them lines in Hindi, even in Kannada! I mean, most of India doesn’t know Kannada! He tried to make sure that they got the pronunciations right. It was good fun to do it because the people were going along with it, they were great sports. Having them sing with us was just a mindblowing experience. The equivalent would be a Russian band coming to India and getting Indians to sing in Russian.

The Jeonju Sori festival in Korea was a one-of-a-kind experience for us. There were 15 acts that played over four hours of the festival. Each act got about 10 minutes each. There were about 15,000 people there at an open-air theatre. It was broadcast live on national television there. The who’s-who of the Korean performing world were there. Playing to such a big audience was a great experience.

Did you meet many Indian people? Had they heard your music before?
In Japan we played at the Indian festival, so we met a lot of Indians there. Hong Kong had a lot of Indians. Vladivostok (in Russia) has a total Indian population of five. We immediately doubled the population of Indians when we went to Vladivostok.

Some people had heard our music earlier. Raghu’s recent Kannada movie has been a success musically, and news of that has travelled to the Kannada communities abroad. Because of that they had managed to check out the album and heard some of the songs. The non-Indian crowd had absolutely no idea who we were.

What was the tour’s most difficult or frustrating experience?
The Korean leg of the tour only got confirmed two days before we were scheduled to go there from Japan. We just had our tickets to Korea and our tickets out of there, and no other idea about what was happening. The person who we were in contact with all along had quit the Indian embassy and had moved to another country. So while we were in Japan, we were totally unsure about what was going to happen over the next six days. In the worst case we assumed we’d have a five day holiday in Korea.

But eventually, we ended up playing the most number of shows in Korea (four shows).

What is your advice to Indian bands that have the opportunity to play abroad?
Firstly, go there with something that you have. Don’t try to be something you’re not. What worked most in our favour was that we knew what we were and we showed that. We weren’t trying to be a band that those people would identify with immediately. We were just trying to be the band that we are. We wear our lungis on stage, we sing in our mother tongue. Just because you go to a place that is not your own, it doesn’t mean you have to transform yourself to what that place is about. You will find people who appreciate you for being what you are.

People all over the world are looking for something different, something they haven’t already seen.