Amit Trivedi on his upcoming gig at the NH7 Weekender

Vijay Nair, CEO, Only Much Louder, the organisers of Weekender, says, “Amit is the only musician in recent times who has managed to build such a diverse fanbase. He is one of the few musicians who can claim that he doesn’t fit into any genre.”

Trivedi has earned this kind of universality because of his desire to see and establish himself as a musician beyond a film composer. He doesn’t want to be restricted to Bollywood and is seriously pursuing alternative platforms that give him more freedom as an artiste. “I am just looking to find outlets to express my personality, and these platforms are giving me that,” says Trivedi. He was a part of the last two seasons of Coke Studio@MTV and maybe a part of a couple of similar shows. He will appear in the upcoming MTV Unplugged, besides NH7 Weekender. Trivedi has even got a band of his own, with fixed names such as esraj player Arshad Khan and string instrument specialist Tapas Roy, that accompanies him in all his non-film endeavours.

The rise of indie culture, in the past few years, has made it a much abused word — giving greater respectability to things that don’t deserve them. But Trivedi has a simple viewpoint; “Music should be honest, touch hearts, sound good to the ears. Be it indie, Bollywood
or bhajans.”

His only reservation about the prevalent musical culture is that it is too inspired by the West. “The folk and classical traditions of India are ridiculously untapped by our musicians. Maybe they don’t find it cool enough. And it is amazing to see how cool it becomes when say, a thumri is fused with EDM,” he says.

The reason behind his independent identity as a musician despite working in Bollywood is his choice of films. He has consistently selected films that are “different”, ranging from the angsty and existential (Dev D, which won him the National Film Award), soul-stirring (Kai Po Che and Lootera) to soft and breezy (Aisha) among others.

His next big film is however, the hugely ambitious Bombay Velvet that sees the return of the Trivedi-Amitabh Bhattacharya-Anurag Kashyap team. A soundtrack for a dark Bombay tale from the ’60s, it is going to be Bollywood’s first tryst with serious jazz, says Trivedi.

“It’s the kind of music the Bombay clubs of that time played. The book Taj Mahal Foxtrot was a key point in our research. It is old school jazz, but Bollywoodised,” he says.