The interview which appears below, was originally published on Mumbai Mirror in July 2008. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
It’s easy to get slotted here, and given that Bollywood is all about cliques and camaraderie, one is tempted to go that route with Rashid Ali as well. Rashid (42) is the flavor of the season (apart from the boy-wonder Imran Khan) given that his song ‘Kabhi Kabhi Aditi’ from the film Jaane Tu… is a chartbuster. Yet, the NRI singer is untouched by the feverish aspiration of making it big in tinsel town; he’d rather simply be a busy musician for now.
Born in UP and brought up in London, his father a retired businessman and mother a ghazal singer who trained with Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan, Rashid’s sensibility towards melody has been multi-ethnic. He grew up with strains of classical Hindustani music wafting at home while outside, it was R&B, Jazz, and House. He is of that generation that was obsessed with Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Sting. Today, some of his favorites are Al Di Meola, flamenco guitarist Paco De Lucia, and musicians like Chick Corea. Sting has been an enduring favorite.
“I was like a sponge as a kid, soaking it all in,” says Rashid. “I am happy that I grew up in London, as it exposed me to a wide range of international music — Greek, Italian, the lot.” While in his teens he gravitated to fusion jazz and soon took to the guitar. He chose the guitar over the violin when faced with a choice of instruments as he knew that the former would support his singing as well. “Can you imagine me singing ‘Kabhi Kabhi Aditi’ while playing the violin?” he laughs, humming the first lines. “The guitar offered both vitality and virility, as it always does to boys in their teens.”
Rashid was spotted at a concert in London by A.R. Rahman about six years ago. Rahman walked up to him for a casual chat, although Rashid did not know much about him except for his work in Rangeela. “We got along and I became part of his troupe for a while as a guitarist,” he says. He worked with the maestro on the Bombay Dreams project in 2002 in the formative phase, only to quit soon when the schedules became too manic.
They travelled together across India on the 2003 tour titled Unity of Light. There, he improvised on ‘Ooh La La La’ by infusing it with jazz and played the title track of Rangeela as well. “Jazz gives a musician rigour. You have to fuse the various elements of music very subtly, pretty much like Hindustani classical music. If you master that, you can improvise on any kind of music.”
Clearly, there was to be no looking back, at least not with Rahman after that. He offered playback support in a few Tamil films with him, until Jaane Tu was to put him on the map eventually.
“I have never consciously aspired for Bollywood; but wanted to do just enough for people to recognize my voice, my guitar, and eventually my compositions,” he says. “Come to think of it, I was always keen to go on stage, even as a kid. When my mother released her first album of ghazals in London, I went up on stage and sang an old Kishore Kumar favorite, ‘Mere Dil Mein Aaj Kya Hai’. Going up on stage as often as I was urged to, during community functions and such, didn’t bother me at all.”
Next up, Rashid is busy putting the final touches to his compositions for an album to be produced by Rahman, of whom he says, “A.R. is very definite about his ideas and vision but at the same time gives the artist freedom along a given framework. He has always welcomed my musical ideas and individuality such as on some of the guitar vamps on ‘Kabhi Kabhi Aditi’.”
Contemporary Bollywood could do with some mature youthfulness and Rashid fits right in.
