Asha Puthli at the Barbican

The 2006 EFG London Jazz Festival got off to slightly strange start for me. Why did I buy a ticket for Asha Puthli’s concert at the Barbican Hall? Curiosity, mostly. Because I’d interviewed her back in 1972, out of an interest in meeting the person Ornette Coleman had invited to sing on a couple of tracks of Science Fiction, his recently released LP, and because last night’s guest artists included the trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, the sitarist Anoushka Shankar and the tabla drummer Sarathy Korwar. To be frank, I hadn’t kept tabs on Puthli over the past five decades, although I knew that she’d featured in the disco and fashion worlds. What I remember of meeting her was that she came from a privileged background in Bombay (now Mumbai), studied the tarana style of Hindustani classical singing from childhood, fell in love with jazz, arrived in New York in 1969 with scholarship to study dance with Martha Graham, and told me, in startlingly explicit terms, a story about being propositioned by a…

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