Plugging In the Indian Roots of Electronic Music

Without the 303 - which was only manufactured between 1982 and 1984 -  electronic music as we know it would be simply unrecognizable.  

The strangest part of the story is that none of this was part of Roland’s plan when they designed it: the sequencer was developed to give live musicians a human bassist proxy for practice sessions, not to be heard on an actual recording.

Former R&D director Tadao Kikumoto never could have imagined the wonderful accident that would occur in the mid-eighties, when a handful of crafty Chicago producers would weaponize it in the service of a new genre called acid house.

Yet, this accident had a precursor: a then-relatively unknown studio musician named Charanjit Singh Panesar.

He had never heard of acid house then, and for one simple reason: acid house didn’t exist in 1982, and neither did most forms of dancefloor-oriented, quantized, sequenced electronic music.

Charanjit was born in modest circumstances, and spent his formative years in the Matunga area of Bombay. His parents passed away at a young age, and to this day, he has no recollection of them. Raised by his elder brother’s wife, Charanjit spent most of his teenage years in his family’s musical equipment shop, Singh Musical Instruments. The shop provided a relatively sheltered arena for young Charanjit, and an anchor for his extended family’s social life. More pertinently, it was an incubator for his blossoming skills as a multi-instrumentalist.

Upon finishing high school, Singh got his first gigs as part of a pop band that integrated Indian musical themes into the Latin percussion-influenced style that was popular at the time. “We used to play weddings, private parties, small things in Bombay. I enjoyed it,” he reminisces.

As the band gained traction, it pulled him into a web of working musicians who made their livelihood orchestrating and recording music for film.

Bolstered by the success of the band and the connections he was making, Charanjit began touring internationally in the 1960s alongside some of the most renowned singers in Indian film music.

When Charanjit returned to Bombay, he began recording and releasing his own EPs and LPs, playing solo interpretations of popular instrumental film songs of the time with the combined power of the Transicord and clavioline. His unrivaled collection of music technology gave him an edge over the competition, Charanjit says, and it allowed him to play the local circuit with live performances billed as “one man shows.”

In 1972, Charanjit would use this Transicord to record the iconic drone sound that opens the massive hit “Dum Maro Dum” from Hare Krishna Hare Rama, a film scored by iconic film composer RD Burman. It was one of the big breaks of his career, and the composer kept Singh around for as many recording sessions as possible.

With Burman’s visionary steering, and more and more resourceful players finding ways of acquiring gear despite hefty, socialist-era import duties, the sound of Bollywood shifted more and more towards analogue synthesizers. 

These new sonic possibilities forged the introduction of the 4/4 disco beat - the final element of the Ten Ragas backstory. India’s disco explosion can be more or less be attributed to one man, Bappi Lahiri. “I was on tour in 1979, and after a performance I went to a discotheque. It was the first time I saw how a DJ could control a crowd like that.” Upon his return, he began writing a series of film scores and independent releases that integrated the synth-heavy, dancefloor-focused tropes of disco, igniting a craze that consumed Indian film music.

Beyond Lahiri, non-film related, records also reflected the trend: the 808 and arpeggiator driven Babla’s Disco Sensation being one example. Throughout the early eighties, he and his wife Kanchan pioneered Disco Dandia, a hybrid of his interest in analogue synthesis, disco, and traditional music forms from his home state, Gujarat.

All of which brings us back to Charanjit. Throughout the seventies, he was steadily employed by RD Burman and his circle of peers, though in many ways his career had started to plateau. In the studio world, a bass player will often remain a bass player, and under-appreciated session musicians were, for the most part, expected to simply do their job.

The business was framed by well-defined hierarchies — ones that were difficult to break — and soon the spectre of boredom began to set in for Charanjit. Meanwhile, his first marriage dissolved, and after the middle of the decade, he found himself in a protracted creative slump, at least as far as his paid session gigs were concerned. If not for his old and dear friend and peer Kishore Kumar, Ten Ragas may not have occurred.

In 1976, Kumar introduced him to a dancer who was part of his traveling live show at the time: one Suparna Das. They soon were married, and a new chapter opened for Charanjit.

In Suparna, Singh found both a sense of stability - she can be as demanding and gregarious as he can be aloof and distant - as well as the kind of support that would help him strike out on his own. As she puts it, “I told him, focus on your work. You are an artist, and you have to do what you feel is right - your own music.”

Now forty years old, Singh began to retreat from the film industry. Preferring solo and duo performances, he and Suparna shifted their focus to lucrative private shows, both in India and amongst the South Asian diaspora internationally, mostly singing old film songs together.

For Charanjit, Ten Ragas offered an opportunity to explore his own hermetic vision, with little to no concern for what his peers might think. When asked why he was so drawn to the Roland gear he acquired, his response is pragmatic. “A tabla player might fall out of time. But machines, they don’t make mistakes.” It would take over thirty years for the rest of the world to appreciate his assessment of the value of precision.

The effect he had on how I look at the world around and within me was seismic. It's taken almost ten years for me to come to grips with how meeting him changed my life, many times over. His conviction and belief in his own vision and pursuing it against all odds not only deeply inspired me, but also the premise of what kind of artistry I have chosen to showcase here in India.

On July 5, 2015, after almost four years of being with him on a journey I never really could have planned, let alone imagined, Charanjit passed away of natural causes, six months after his partner in life Suparna passed away.  He was 75 years old.