DOWNBEAT MAGAZINE
BY HOWARD MANDEL

Asha Puthli has been one of jazz’s mystery women for 35 years. Late last summer she made a rare visit to New York City and left audiences, again, wondering where she’s been.

In 1972, from the opening bars of “What Reason Could I Give” from Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction, Puthli’s voice blossoms with beguilement, modesty, candor, intimacy, precise articulation, tensile strength, nuance and insight. On “All My Life,” opening the LP’s second side, she expresses acute longing and immense satisfaction in her first two phrases. Those performances indelibly cast the perfect vocal complement to Coleman’s harmolodic evocation of emotional and psychological truths in beautiful song, and won Puthli high scores in that year’s DownBeat Critics Poll. Great things were near.

But then Puthli disappeared from jazz, with no further blips for 16 years, until Henry Threadgill’s 1988 album Easily Slip lnto Another World featured her eight-minute tour-de-force “My Rock.”

And, again, jazz silence, until last September, when Puthli proved she does exist with appearances at New York City’s Central Park Summerstage and Joe’s Pub. Reputedly a famed disco diva in Europe, a pop star in Asia and Australia, and recipient of a lifetime achievement recognition in the 7th annual

Bollywood Music Awards, Puthli says she’s lived “the Gypsy life” in New York City, Palm Beach, Fla., various European capitals and her native Mumbai, but now wants to focus on her American career.

Golden-haired, moving airily, draped in a gauzy shawl, Puthli fronted a baod at Joe’s Pub of two backup vocalists, slick keyboard arrangemeots, laptop-generated enhancements, funky bass and drums. Her repertoire was dizzingly multifaceted: Gnarls Barklcy’s “Crazy,” a lewd audience singalong, covers of Joni Mitchell and Bill Withers tunes, and a revereot version of the Duke Ellington—Billy Strayhom’s classic “A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing.” Jazzbos were all grins, as were Puthli’s followers from other scenes, who cheered her “Space Talk” from one of her 1980s albums (sampled recently by Jay-Z and Germaine Dupree, haviog being revived in 1997 by Puff Daddy and Notorius B J.G.) and her wail of “The Devil Is Loose.” Everyone sensed that Puthli was on a roll, though some may not have realized that she’d already made a mark.

“I’m not an avant-garde jazz singer,” Puthli said. “I’m sorry if I’ve given anyone that impression, but it’s not something that I ever trained to do. I feel blessed and fortunate that I met Ornette, who has always been wonderful flame, and that I worked with Henry. But my

dream was to sing standard jazz like Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, backed by the Nelson Riddle Orchestrn. I’ve sung every ldnd of music. In Germany and Italy they say I was the progenitor of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s Munich sound.”

Puthli, third child of a traditional Hindi family, had an exemplary education, including private tutors in both Western classical and North Indian music, and first came to the United States in the late l960s to study dance with Martha Graham. Drawn to hippiedom, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll nnd Motown, her image didn’t click in the States, she said, perhaps because of her name.

“People hear ‘Asha Puthli,’ they think finger-cymbals and chanting,” she said.

Signed to a five-album contract by CBS England, she fell victim to corporate infighting and suspended her career for motherhood and family life, reviving it occasionally for projects that never seemed to reach the States. But she kept singing, acting, performing on television and recording.

Now her son is grown, marriage over and familiar responsibilities abroad fulfilled. Puthli’s new manager, Jason King, organized her New York dates, rounded up and rehearsed the band, brainstormed on her set list and has helped her reclaim rights to her Columbia catalog. Puthli and King are also considering reissue deals.