Reimagining Classics: Suman Sridhar on her recent hit Fifi for Bombay Velvet
Sridhar is multitasking on several projects. This includes a solo album and a multimedia opera project that will include Tamil folk music for which she has received the Google-INK Trailblazer’s Grant 2014.
Her lilting voice unmistakable, Suman Sridhar first shot to fame among the masses in 2011 for her rendition of the classic Khoya khoya chand for Shaitan. The singer has since lent her vocals to remixes of Tum jo mil gaye ho from Hanste Zakhm (1973) and Pukarta chala hoon main from Mere Sanam (1965).
So when the makers of Bombay Velvet announced that the first song from the film will be a reinterpretation of Jaata kahaan hai deewane from CID (1956), it wasn’t surprising that they thought of Sridhar. “Fifi is a foot-tapping number harking back to Bombay of the ’60s, the underworld and all that jazz,” she says of the song that has been composed by long-time collaborator Mikey McCleary. Though, this isn’t the first time the duo have worked on the song.
In 2011, Sridhar and McCleary worked on Jaata kahaan hai deewane for a TVC by Dibakar Banerjee.
Part of the buzz can be attributed to the fact that the original had been edited out of the popular Dev Anand film before release. Picturised on Waheeda Rahman, the track ran into trouble with the censors. Some say the committee objected that the song depicted a CID officer being seduced by a vamp while according to another version, they found the word ‘fifi’ vulgar.
“A huge fan” of Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Geeta Dutt and Kavita Krishnamurthy, Sridhar considers herself fortunate for the niche she has found for herself in Bollywood. While her renditions have been popular so far,
Sridhar does accept that they tend to sound similar as she is expected to sing in a similar seductive style. “The market is notorious for repeating something that trends. I guess the familiarity of such repetition is soothing to audiences’ ears,” she says.
A trained opera singer, the 32-year-old is a versatile artiste and her creative projects span visual art, theatre, poetry and performance art. Outside her film projects, she is known for her collaboration with poet Jeet Thayil as the outfit Sridhar/Thayil. The duo, along with filmmaker Natasha Mendonca, also worked on a sound intervention at the Kochi Biennale that opened in December 2014. “Prior to that, I created sound design for artiste Tejal Shah’s multi-channel video installation, Between The Waves, which was part of dOCUMENTA in 2013. And an excerpted performance of Feio, a track off my forthcoming debut solo album features in the CineMoon series of films that were screened at the Tate Modern in 2013,” she says.
Currently, Sridhar is multitasking on several projects. This includes a solo album and a multimedia opera project that will include Tamil folk music for which she has received the Google-INK Trailblazer’s Grant 2014. Sridhar will also make her acting debut in Mendonca’s film, Ajeeb Aashiq. “It is an experiment in melting the boundaries between reality and fiction, time and space. I play the role of an aspiring singer in Bollywood. The film brings light to the labour behind the glamour of the industry through a poetic and non-linear narrative style,” she says.
Mendonca, who received the Hubert Bals Grant for the film, is scheduled to premiere it at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016. “As a child, I was never told to only stick to drawing or singing but encouraged to experiment with everything. Thankfully, our markets are also catching up with the intermingling of forms.”
Source:: Indian Express
