Karsh is married but not officially!

He’s a composer, plays multiple instruments, and has recently started giving music score for Hindi cinema – meet Karsh Kale.
As a little boy, born in West Bromwich, and later based in New York City, Karsh was exposed to varied genres of music, and this formed the base for him – mixing genres, be it hip-hop, jazz, rock or classical to create his own fusion music.
This musician of Indian origin, was recently the composer for – “Bang On A Can”, a prestigious concert in New York.
““Bang On A Can” has been happening in New York for over 15 years and it brings together a lot of musicians and composers. And it has people like Sting, performing along with some very seasoned and accomplished musicians. They commission musicians every year, and look for upcoming artistes, and this year they asked me to compose a piece for their finale,” says Karsh.
And “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly” was the name he gave to his composition. “It was inspired by a character who is in his older years, and is looking back at the different stages of his life. And this is something I was looking at as inspiration. And it doesn’t particularly mean anything... It can mean many different things to different people.”
Sounds like Shakespearean influence – Seven stages of life? “Yeah, somewhat like that... but this is not definitive. We go through these stages many times in life...”
About his own stages of life and music in it, he says, “Music, as a career, started while I was in New York University. Being in NY, I immediately started leaning towards drums and tabla playing, and started experimenting with a lot of other trained artistes.”
But long before this, this musician started off when he was five-years-old. “My father’s into Indian classical music and my elder brother and sister were discovering American pop and rock music. And I started listening to The Beatles that my father used to play, then I started listening to Led Zepplin, Michael Jackson etc, and there was my mom listening to a film soundtrack. There were many elements, and I used that in my expression of music. I have immersed myself in jazz and I have spent years playing strictly jazz music and then some years I spent playing only heavy rock music. And then it shifted to jazz fusion, ghazals and Indian classical. And when you start writing your own music, you can take elements and break it down. My music draws from a lot of different places and represents more than an archetype. Everything ends up becoming a cliché unless it’s constantly reinvented,” says Karsh.
Karsh’s new album titled “Cinema” will be out in the States and Europe in April and in May or June it will be in India. “I called it “Cinema” because it has such a huge sound. Everything from deejaying at festivals, to playing live with my live band which is an aggressive electronic fusion band and doing projects with Vijay Iyer and Shujaat Khan which was jazz fusion with Indian Classical, and scoring for Bollywood films to rescoring “Enter the Dragon”. So this is a statement that would sum up all of my experiences in all these years.”
Talking about Bollywood project, he says, “We are (MPKK - Midival Punditz and Karsh Kale) doing the background score for “Dum Maaro Dum” which is a Ramesh Sippy film scheduled to release in April this year and we are doing the background for a film that’s Neerav Ghosh’s debut.”
Karsh likes to keep his private life private, dogging questions with a smile. Are you seeing someone, we inquired? “That’s private,” he says laughing. Umm... So then he’s not married obviously? “We’re not officially married, but I’ve been with someone for 12 years,” he smiles.