Fire works

The band is also excited about their first foreign collaboration with Etienne Mbappe,a famous bass player from Cameroon. Mbappe,a well-known bass player from Cameroon had come down to Mumbai with jazz keyboardist Bill Evans for a performance,when the band members of Agnee met him for the first time. “He came home and we hung out from from 10 in the night till 7 in the morning,playing music all the while. By the morning,we had gotten over the awe of having a celebrity in our house,and could speak to him almost normally. So we asked him whether he would do a song with us,” says K Mohan,Agnee’s vocalist. So the band sent Mbappe a Punjabi song that they had been working on. “For the song that we were working on,we wanted personalities of the artistes to come through in it. That is why we also asked Daler Mehndi to sing it for us. Mbappe sent us a dubbed version within half an hour of us sending the song to him,” says Mohan. “This is a song relevant to the present day situation in the country. It’s about the way people are,and the way we hope them to be. There are a lot of references to Punjabi history and to Guru Gobindji’s ladai,with lyrics by Jatinder Mauhar.”

Apart from these projects,Agnee is also gearing up for their new album,which will have classic songs like Gore gore banke chhore and Aayega aane wala from the ’30s to the ’50s reinvented in their own style. “It’s exciting because when you think – Aayega aane wala,you automatically have its tune in your head. To try and reinvent it without doing injustice to the original composition,is scary and fun at the same time,” Mohan says. The album will have ten songs slated for release together,while the videos will be released on at a time,starting from December.