Out of the Blues

Bassist Indraneel Hariharan’s interesting chord progressions and basslines have been the toast of Delhi’s music circuit for a while now. Known for being the “man with the groove” and one of the pillars of Delhi-based contemporary fusion band Mrigya,Hariharan was busy with international tours and jam sessions when debut director Avinash Kumar Singh got him away from his jampad for a few days to work in Quarter Note,a Malviya Nagar-based studio,where he composed for Singh’s upcoming film Listen Amaya. The much-awaited film features actors Farooqe Shaikh and Deepti Naval,who will be back on screen after a hiatus of 25 years.

“The brief that I received was that the music had to be quiet,mostly acoustic,yet intense. Avinash was not looking for anything crazy,” says Hariharan,who has also played most of the instruments in the album himself and arranged it all together. “I am not a fan of very commercial sounding music. I was looking at simple acoustic tracks that suited my film,which is multilayered in terms of the characters and their relationships,” says Singh. The film is the story of a mother and daughter in an urban setting,where the daughter can’t let go of her dead father’s memories and disapproves of her mother’s relationship with another man.

It recently premiered at Chicago South Asian Film Festival and received a warm welcome from a packed hall. The songs include the soft and flowy Kashmakash sung by Kunal Ganjawala and an interesting track titled Man ki patango mein sung by Vidhi Sharma that comes with interesting interludes and mellow hooks. There is also a jingle-like song called Coffee. “I have been a jingle man for a long time. This is my turf,” says Hariharan about the songs that have been penned by his wife Punam Hariharan. But the most interesting song is a rock funk version of the iconic Kishore Kumar track Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si and Hariharan is nervous and excited about this one. “I did not want to touch an iconic song and make it into something weird-sounding because 90 per cent of the time people will end up criticising it. So I have retained the melody but the delivery is completely different,” says Hariharan about the song that uses a lot of soft riffling and has a very bluesy tone to it.