It’s a platform that’s witnessed a Jordanian singer blend voices with a Buddhist nun in an A.R. Rahman composition about motherhood and love. It’s seen a Rajasthani widow of seven children belt songs to the beats of a British-Indian woman rapper. It’s seen traditional Punjabi folk musicians share stage with a seasoned Bollywood playback singer. For three seasons now, Coke Studio at MTV has made a habit of weaving magic from the most unsuspecting ingredients.
Take a sneak-peek at the just-released trailer for Season 4, though, and there isn’t even a glimpse of the usual red-carpeted, plush studio confines. Instead, there’s composer Amit Trivedi cycling down a forest path, playback singers Shalmali Kholgade and Rekha Bharadwaj dancing around trees, music directors Pritam and Papon playing instruments in the sunshine, while the Vishal-Shekhar duo drives away singing in a jeep. The music’s evidently broken out of the studio and reached the streets. And that’s the biggest change this time around — a shift from just the music to storytelling about the composition and the songwriters’ lives too — shares Aditya Swamy, MTV’s executive vice-president and business head, who has hand-held the show’s curation from its inception.
Seated at Season 4’s glamourous launch one evening in Mumbai, while the who’s-who of independent Indian music strides by, Aditya and Debabrata Mukherjee, VP marketing and commercial, Coca-Cola India and South West Asia, tell the story of Coke Studio’s evolution. “Our first brief was this simple — ‘Things that don’t otherwise come together, come together at Coke Studio’,” says Aditya, and thus Season 1 saw Leslie Lewis direct about 50 compositions, mixing and matching artistes in experimental combinations. Season 2 and 3 broadened creative horizons by giving an episode each to producers, like Amit Trivedi, Ehsaan Noorani and Loy Mendonsa, Ram Sampath and Clinton Cerejo, who were told to ‘compose outside their comfort zones’. “It featured people like Nitin Sawhney, who played sold-out shows with Philharmonic orchestras but wasn’t well known within India, composing for someone like the Assamese singer Papon; or Karsh Kale, underground DJ and self-taught tabla player, performing with Bollywood playback singer Shilpa Rao. We were just having fun putting things together!” says Aditya.
Over three years, besides stacking up a formidable playlist of 150 songs, Coke Studio at MTV, has also built its fair share of studio stories. For instance, in Ram Sampath’s ‘Katte’, a powerful composition about outcasts and belonging, lead vocalist Bhanvari Devi from the heartlands of Rajasthan, who never once took her veil off her head, said her widowhood disallowed her from singing, unless a family member was present. “So, all through the recording, we had her son seated in the studio just so that she could sing!” says Aditya. In another instance, Sawan Khan, a Manganiyar, who was performing brilliantly in the rehearsals, stepped into the studio and froze. “That’s when we realised he’d never performed with headphones in his life; the moment we took them off he nailed it!” It is these stories behind the music that the audience wants to know, observes Debabrata, and hence the massive revamp in the show’s latest avatar.
Each episode of Season 4 will now feature just one song by a different producer, but will consist of five segments — an introduction to the producer, the story of the song’s conception, insight into its collaborators, a studio session of all musicians together, a music video of the song, and the making of the music video. Moreover, instead of airing just the usual two months each year, each episode of this Season releases on the first Sunday of every month — 12 episodes for 12 months starting this March. Besides the need for deeper storytelling, Aditya says these changes have also been informed by trends in the music industry itself. “Music isn’t an audio product anymore; people watch music as much as listen to it, and hence the visual delight of music videos besides the now-predictable studio setting. Second, consumers now only purchase singles, hardly full albums, and so we’ll now focus on just one song. And third, we’ve realised that to actually make an impact in India’s musical landscape, we need to be around for more than eight weeks; this way we’re always on, year long.”
Will audiences accustomed to the rich variety of a multi-track episode from each producer take to the new format? “It’s a gamble each time,” laughs Aditya, who’s banking on the talent of his illustrious line-up this season to charge them through the year. “We have the ‘Coke Studio stars’ — Amit Trivedi, Papon, Clinton Cerejo, Ram Sampath — people who’ve proved themselves in previous seasons but must now face the challenge of this structure. Then there are those we’ve always wanted on the show but never got — music directors Pritham and Sneha Khanwalkar — besides the youngsters taking Bollywood by storm, duo Sachin-Jigar.” Representing the new wave of desi hip-hop, there’s also Raftaar and Badshah, whose work Aditya says parallels Brooklyn hip-hop, merely in Punjabi.
As the Mumbai night grows deeper and the launch party draws to a close, the first episode of Season 4 screens larger than life. There’s Amit Trivedi singing about everlasting love alongside gutsy, powerful Punjabi vocals by Harshdeep Kaur and Jyoti Nooran, in a track titled ‘Teriyaan Tu Jaane’. The screen flips over and the song replays, this time with dancer Mukti Mohan freelance jiving to the track all across the streets of Mumbai, from the dhobi ghats to college courtyards. It’s the same music in a whole new light of meaning. “And that’s what Coke Studio’s all about,” says Aditya, “Predictability will be our only sin.”
The first episode of Coke Studio at MTV, Season 4, airs tomorrow, March 1, at 8 p.m. on MTV.
(The writer was at the Mumbai launch at the invitation of Coke Studio.)
Artiste responses
Papon
I grew up with music videos — Pink Floyd, Bon Jovi — you name it and those were my influences. But today, all we have are film music videos. This new format of Coke Studio, with videos for each song, I hope, will bring back that art of music-video making which we’ve lost, that art of storytelling through music. It’s been an amazing experience to be on the show from its first Season. This time around, I’m excited about creating something absolutely fresh, where the classical and folk core of ethnic India meets new-age India. With the one-song format, there’s definitely less pressure than creating a full set in under two months, but here, you don’t get to represent your repertoire; you just get one chance to make your mark.
Amit Trivedi
It was at a gig in Kolkata, where we were playing hard-core Bollywood music, and suddenly the crowd started screaming for ‘Badri Badariyan’ from Season 2 that I realised just how popular independent, non-Bollywood music like Coke Studio has become in this country. For this season, I had a tune in mind that I was looking for someone to write on, when we got this phrase “teriyaan tu jaane”, and from there the song became about celebrating unconditional love. As we are at the first episode of this season, I’m eager to see whether it will click or not!
Sneha Khanwalkar
I have to make my music interesting to myself, and my interests lie elsewhere from the mainstream. Thus far, most of my music, especially for films like Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2 , and Love Sex aur Dhokha , has bordered on the dark and intense. I’ve never focused on pure, cutesy happiness which will be my theme this time. I don’t know as yet what my composition is going to be, but I must tell you, this process of not knowing, yet simultaneously creating, is beautiful!
