Rolling Stone

We're happy to inform you that Rolling Stone (India) magazine has published an article about Shor Bazaar. The interview for this by their journalist Neha Sharma and can be found on the August edition of the magazine. We would like to thank them for the same.

In the same edition, we were surpised to find a review for one of the acoustic songs (Rasili Acoustic) on our MySpace page. We're flabbergasted at the 3.5 star rating (thank you!) and all the nice things, some of which even we weren't aware of, written there.

Thank you Rolling Stone India!

The snaps of the interview page is included here as well as the review page are given below.

The Shor-istory

People have often asked us how we came together and formed a band. No, our Dads weren't jazz pianists who inspired us to take music up as a career. Neither were we buddies from high school who dropped out after deciding to form a band. The fact is that we all are 'immigrants' to Mumbai and we are together thanks to a heavy dose of serendipity. Here's how.

The Shor-istory by The Doc

Sometime in 2006, JD, an IIT-Kharagpur Mechanical Engineering graduate who was working for ITC, he felt the urge to start writing music. He started on his own at first scribbling down lyrics over simple chord progressions on the guitar. His job led him all across India from Orissa to Gujarat to Chennai across cultures which gave him the inspiration to write more. Soon he felt the need to have company to expand his repertoire. Enter Joy.

He saw a ad posted on RSJ Online by Joy for musicians interested in forming a hindi band. At that time Joy was working for Mastek in Mumbai and JD was working at Silvasa. They decided to meet up at Joy's place in Mumbai. The next weekend saw Joy and JD jamming. Enter Robin.

Robin, the younger brother of Joy, a commerce student at NM College and a guitar-prodigy even at the young age of 17, joined them in their sessions. A couple of months of jamming over weekends led to nothing significant and they decided to call off their ambitious plans for building a band.

They took a year long hiatus and work led them further away than they already were. Thankfully, both of them got fed up with their lives and their mundane day jobs. Both got back in touch with each other and decide to take a sabbatical from their jobs to try and restart their original venture. This was sometime in September 2007. Both met again in our Alma Mater, the apartment of the Dasguptas in early December 2007. The name was also decided somewhere during this period. With lots of new songs added to their repertoire, they decided to look for bassists and drummers to complete the band. IIT-B’s Mood-I was around the corner and it seemed the perfect stage to start. Enter KK.

I, KK, was doing rather well in life whilst being in the final months of my surgical residency in Orthopaedics at KEM hospital in Mumbai. I already knew Robin via the acoustic band that we were part of called Cirkles. On the 9th of December, Robin called me over to his apartment to jam. I was introduced to JD and after pleasantries, JD and Robin jammed a couple of songs on the guitar. I was literally blown away by the music and JD’s vocals and I, despite my commitments, agreed to join the band as the bassist.

Together we streamlined a set-list of four songs for the competition. A couple of drummers were short-listed from the contacts that Robin had. We jammed with both of them. The result was nothing to write home about and a few days before Mood-I, we were still without a drummer. We were desperate. Enter Sumit.

Sumit, a gifted game designer working for India Games, is my childhood friend from Kerala where we started jamming a decade ago. Sumit was called in and just like me, he fell in love with JD’s beautiful songwriting and decided to try out as the drummer. A couple of jam sessions in the only operational Bajaao.com jam pad in Mumbai and we became the present version of Shor Bazaar.

Sorry, but we're back!

OK!
It's been 3 months since the last update on this blog, and that is a very long time! So, this is what we've been upto during the hiatus.

• Shor Bazaar signed on to Phat Phish Records, (a well known Indie label), sometime in May (yippee!) with an intent to release its debut album (double yippee!!). Allow us to whisper psst that the timeline for release looks like Oct’08 :)
  
• For most of May-June, the band took a break to wind up our jobs/courses etc. so as to get free for the impending recordings.
  
• At about the same time, we started looking for audio engineers and studios. We chose the wonderful Chinmay Harshe as the audio engineer and the famous Empire Studios for the tracking and mixing of the album.
  
• Late in June, ShorBazaar was invited to the studios of Radio One 94.3 for a live interview and acoustic session with the wonderful RJ Malini Agarwal. (The recordings of the show can be heard on our MySpace page. Go check them out and give your 2 cents!)
  
• And then finally on the 7th of July 2008, ShorBazaar started recording sessions for its first album, at Empire Studios, Mumbai.
  
• We must also mention Furtados Music who were very generous with their support our recording sessions. We are extremely thankful to Anthony, Sahil (The DemonStealer) and the entire Furtados team for this helping hand!
  
• Finally ladies and gentlemen, today, as we head into the last days of studiotime, we are very happy to announce that we are almost done :). That too despite a recalcitrant Lower Respiratory Tract Infection to JD and a tendinitis of KK’s left hand! We would like to attribute that to the wonderful atmosphere in the studios thanks to Chinmay and Harshad! We love you guys!

The tracks will be mixed and mastered in the coming weeks. If everything goes to plan, we will be able to respect that Oct’08 release that we talked about! Well that's about it for now.

We would love to hear from you!

MySpace page

Apparently, this blog is not being received well by the fans. It is seen as an unprofessional way of reaching out to fans. A few people think that we shouldn't be having a blog. For the reasons stated above, we have decided to do a MySpace page (without which no credible band could exist apparently). Here's the link to the Shor Bazaar MySpace page.It's been up for 2 days. Go check it out and give us feed back. Either here or there.

(PS: I would prefer here! Quite frankly, I don't like Myspace. It is too complicated. And too slow!)

Sorry; something bigger coming up!

Yes, we had promised to upload some of our recordings online for your pleasure. But technological nightmares plagued our little endeavour. The feared 'Dark Blue Screen' adored our computer screens for about a week or so and that set us back. For honesty sake, we have taken a photo of the blue screen when it happened and have presented it.


The dulling experience of the Chennai test and a movie called 'One, Two, Three' also seem to have affected us by blunting our intelligence thereby, strangling the creative process.

Anyway, something bigger is brewing and we'll be telling ya'll about it soon. We have just managed to record one acoustic track and that might be uploaded soon as well.

Till then, sorry guys!

Coming up - the demo recordings!

We believe in innovation. We are almost like Hewlett Packard in that way. That's the reason why we are doing what phirangi bands are doing on their websites. Kanphuse zaala? Khabroo naaaka, tula sangto hai!

We are preparing some songs for putting in our upcoming breakthrough first album. We want the opinion of the Aam janta regarding which ones to keep and which ones to shelf.

Your opinion would hardly count, we can assure you that. But at least, the sense of involvement in the making of such an important event in Indian music history might just make your life look more promising.

We are lazy and we can't stick to our deadlines. Ergo, expect all these prophecies to come true in a few days.

The MidDay article

Sweltering in the sun, heaving up the whole of the 'instrumentation' that we have with us to pose for the photo shoot seemed like overkill. But yesterday, lazily sifting through the e-pages of the e-paper we read, we realized that it had ended well. But all things that end good needn't have such a torrid beginning.

Thanks of Fashutana Patel and Fotografer Ashish Rane from MidDay who actually managed to work with us during this seemingly innocuous (but intensely arduous)task of interviewing/fotografing Shor Bazaar.

What’s that sound?

It’s all about adjacent careers with Shor Bazaar, who sing with Hindi vocals but play western instruments.

THEY came up with their name over chicken soup. Comprising of JD (Jayajit): song writing and lead vocals, Joy: lead and rhythm guitar with backing vocals, Robin: lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keyboard with backing vocals, Sumit: drums and KK (Krishna): bass, Shor Bazaar attributes their name to “The noise inside the head that finds its way out through music.”

Even though their instrumentalisation is primarily Western, JD sings in Hindi. He wonders why he should sing in English that too in accent alien to him. “I want to sing in a language that I’m comfortable with; even if I do sing in English, I’ll sing it like I speak it” he says. Sumit, a selftaught drummer, didn’t expect to be part of a Hindi band, “Then KK told me about the band — not many have Indian roots.”

All five musicians love music from Hindi films of the 70s.

“Basically, we all realised that we had everything but music in our lives,” says Joy. All of the bands members work on the side or have taken sabbaticals from their respective jobs, except for Robin, who’s still studying. Adept with both a scalpel and strings, KK is also a surgeon. Robin and JD have both taken breaks from their jobs, while Sumit simultaneously works and plays with the band. “I played for an English band earlier — it was mostly Western music — but after I started working, I lost touch with music.” says Joy, who met JD after putting up a classified on a website. “JD was in Silvasa at the time, he used to come down to Mumbai on weekends and we used to jam, come out with new melodies, not entire structures. We wanted to start a band that played Hindi music, realising the future was in it.”

Joy’s brother Robin, began with playing keyboards, “I started out by playing Salman Khan songs,” he says with a smile and then picked up the guitar; KK and Sumit joined Shor Bazaar soon after, “We officially began as a band in December last year — ythat’s when we decided to give it an honest attempt,” says Joy. Their songs are an “Urban take on love — it’s more rowdy than mushy… I think people have had enough of mushy love songs,” says Joy about their song Rasili. “Work posted me all over India and I saw a lot of different settings — I tried to express myself in any way that I could. My father was a writer, you could say it’s in my genes,” JD says about his songwriting abilities. “There’s this illusion of work: a great career and life,” he explains when asked why the shift from regular 9-5 jobs to the assuming life of musicians.

“It was difficult, there were times when we didn’t think it would work out, people told us that it seemed like a snap decision and that music does not have fixed paths,” says Joy. “But people are becoming much more receptive to original music. We’re not yet completely satisfied with where we are — you have to keep
trying.”

Shor Bazaar has created three songs as of now: Rasili, Nahin Achha and Khamoshi. They sent their demo to a radio channel, and were chosen for the regional finals and went on to compete in Delhi. “Bands are being given the chance to get into mainstream rather than being restricted to college circuits,” says Joy.

“A band is only as good as its audience. If the audience does not understand what the band is playing — then there’s no point in playing that. We want to be big, we want critical acclaim, but we don’t want to be niché,” says a confident JD.

• PS1 : The photo looks incredible. Seriously so! We look weird in that. Actually we aren't weird like that. We are even weirder.
• PS2 : My bass guitar is not bent like that. It's an optical illusion.
• PS3 : Sumit doesn't play the drumset with the cymbals so far away from the rest of the kit. That was a Photoshop trick!