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An Unseen Songbird in a Thousand Spectacles Enters the Spotlight
By. ANUJ DESAI
Pop stardom usually comes in a youthful, toned package, one dressed in clothes that leave little to the imagination. But that's of no consequence to Asha Bhosle. The sari-wearing 72-year-old Indian, considered a living legend by just a few hundred million people, has developed an American pop following, in collaborations with Michael Stipe and Boy George, as the subject of the Cornershop song "Brimful of Asha" and now, she hopes, with a new album called "Love Supreme" (Times Square Records). On Saturday, she will play Carnegie Hall.
But it's her movie career, as a playback singer in Bollywood, that has made hers among the most recorded voices ever (another belongs to her older sister, Lata Mangeshkar). "The nearest equivalent we have in the United States is probably Elvis," said David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, for whom Ms. Bhosle sang on the album "You've Stolen My Heart: Songs From R. D. Burman's Bollywood."
As an ever-changing array of Bollywood heroines dance and lip-sync to the sound of her voice, Ms. Bhosle (whose name is pronounced AH-shah BOHS-lay) undergoes more makeovers in a year than Madonna will in a lifetime. Over the decades, she has had to sound coquettish, ethereal or matronly while channeling royal courtesans, cabaret stars or stoned hippies. "If singing sad songs," Ms. Bhosle said by telephone from her home in Mumbai recently, "you have to cry."
Indeed, the best playback singers act with their voice. Range is more critical than a set of pipes. The large majority of Ms. Bhosle's work has been recorded live, sometimes with orchestras. Ms. Bhosle credits her father, a well-known musician and dramatist, for emphasizing a thespian's approach to singing. If you don't act, he told her, the song turns out flat. Since the age of 11, she has applied that method to some 13,000 tunes in 18 languages. "My tongue is very flexible," she said.
Among playback singers, she is alone in her insistence on outside experimentation. She has embraced rock 'n' roll, jazz and bhangra (dance music from the Punjab region), and the results have endeared her to multiple generations. She has won won multiple MTV Asia awards along with the Dada Saheb Phalke Award, India's equivalent of the Oscar for lifetime achievement.
When Ms. Bhosle performs Bollywood songs as interpreted by the Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, she will be mixing identities, as usual. Mr. Harrington has promised to dance with Ms. Bhosle onstage. Even if he backs down, she said, "inside I'm dancing." 04/02/06 >> go there
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