Soaking up Carmen Miranda and Shirley Bassey: How the jazz, Afro-Latin greats groomed Asha Bhosle

There are singers who belong to an era, and then there is Asha Bhosle, who treated decades like passing trends she would dip into and then outdo.A vocal sponge, Bhosle was soaking up the pop and jazz greats long before the internet made it easy. "I used to watch Carmen Miranda a lot and try to imitate her style," she had said during an interview about her early inspirations, "like I did later with Shirley Bassey."Tucked into her voluminous saris, the Asha tai who loved dishing out her signature ‘Maa ki Dal' and jaggery kheer she cooked herself was the same woman who watched Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock three times just to nail the phrasing for ‘Eena Meena Deeka'; who once received a letter from the Vatican for her rendition of ‘Ave Maria'; and became the first Indian singer to form a pop group overseas in Britain — the West India Company — in the 1980s.It wasn't accidental. At a time when playback voices in India were still neatly boxed—classical, romantic, devotional—Bhosle was already slipping between them without much of a fuss.Trained in Hindustani classical music, she once said, "If you have the desire and riyaz (practice)…you can sing anything." She took that grounding and wandered into cabaret, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and later, global pop, long before the industry had quite figured out what to call any of it.The turning point, as many stories go, arrived with the Burmans. S D Burman first showed her how to add her own ‘inputs' to a track to make it work, but it was with R D Burman it started taking root when the duo would sit up until 4am listening to jazz and rock records. When he handed her ‘Aaja Aaja' for Teesri Manzil, she is said to have initially balked at its Westernised swagger. This wasn't a tune you could approach like a ghazal. It needed breathless phrasing and a kind of loose shrug. Ten days of rehearsal later, she delivered the track and owned it so completely that it now sounds like it was always hers.That became a pattern. Whether it was the smokey, rhythmic breathing of ‘Piya Tu Ab Toh Aaja' or the pop-ballad ease of ‘Chura Liya Hai,' Bhosle could adjust her vocal cords to match every mood.By the 1990s, when ‘crossover' became a buzzword, she was already living it. "I told my son Anand, I've sung in practically every Indian language but I haven't done English," she had said of her jump into the West India Company. It was a leap into the unknown that would have terrified a lesser artist. "Although the music was ready, there was no fixed tune to sing. I had created my own tune and my own melody when I went in to record," she had said about merging Indian vocals with Western club rhythms and electronic music.This ability to improvise on the fly allowed her to record ‘Bow Down Mister' with Boy George, where Indian devotional strains met synth-heavy pop. It could have been a gimmick. But it wasn't. Instead, it sounded like a natural extension of what she had always done with unaffected ease.At 64 — an age at which most singers are retired from playlists — she stepped right into the center of the MTV glare. She teamed up with the British boy band Code Red for the ballad ‘We Can Make It,' and appeared in a music video, matching the baggy-clothed boy band and their R&B groove with her silk sari and high-pitched alaaps.Soon after, appeared on ‘The Way You Dream' with REM's Michael Stipe for his multimedia project ‘1 Giant Leap', a track that drifted into Hollywood with the 2003 action-comedy film Bulletproof Monk.What followed was even more telling. Bhosle did not so much cross over from East to West as meet it, on equal terms. Cornershop's ‘Brimful of Asha' turned her into a cultural reference point, later remixed by Fatboy Slim into a club staple. The Black Eyed Peas sampled her in ‘Don't Phunk with My Heart', tucking her voice into early-2000s hip-hop. Sarah Brightman lifted ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai' into operatic pop.In 2005, the Kronos Quartet built an album around her, You've Stolen My Heart. She recorded those R D Burman classics with such velocity — three to four songs a day — that the stupefied quartet struggled to keep up. It earned her a Grammy nomination.Even in her later years, she seemed game for unlikely pairings, whether it was a duet with cricketer Brett Lee to cross-border collaborations with Pakistani pop singer Jawad Ahmed that ignored the politics of the moment.Which brings us to 2026. Bhosle, well into her nineties, recording ‘The Shadowy Light' from her Pedder Road home for the genre blurring British virtual band Gorillaz' — her voice against a swirl of hip-hop, dub and electronica, with an old harmonium in the mix — in what would be her final collaboration.
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Also See: Veteran singer Asha Bhosle passes away at age 92 - Check Live Updates