Rupa Biswas

Rupa Biswas
Born1955
Malda Town, West Bengal, India
NationalityIndian
Occupationsinger

Rupa Biswas is an Indian singer who is known for her singular Disco Jazz album.[1][2][3]

Biography

She was born as Sukla Biswas in 1955, in Malda Town, West Bengal, India.[2] Biswas was married to Udayan and has a son Debayan.[2]

Her one and only album, Disco Jazz, was released in 1982, shortly after her father took his family on a holiday to Canada in 1981.[2]

In 1981, at the University of Calgary's Boris Roubakine Hall, she sang geets and ghazals for three hours to an audience which included musicians such as Aashish Khan (later a Grammy Award nominee) and his tabla-playing brother Pranesh Khan, who were grandsons of Allauddin Khan and former collaborators with Ravi Shankar and George Harrison of The Beatles.[2] Aashish and Pranesh Khan had taken an interest in disco music following the success of Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan. The Khan brothers had composed disco music for a project called Disco Jazz. After watching Rupa's performance, the Khan brothers approached her to perform vocals for the project.[4]

The Khan brothers produced her first album Disco Jazz, which was completed in 1981 and released in 1982.[4] The song "Aaj Shanibar" (transl. "Today's Saturday") was mostly sung in the Bengali language, along with some Hindi.[5] She was given vocals written by Aashish Khan's wife Firoza Khan and a cordless mic, which she had never seen before. Rupa was used to wearing traditional Indian clothing and all this was a new experience for her. For the album cover image, she chose a dress which she found in the kids' section of a department store and decided to go with a haircut that she still uses today.[2]

After recording her vocals, she spent time in the United Kingdom with her brother Chandan, who later paid for all her recordings.[2] In 1982, Rupa sold a handful of copies of Disco Jazz and soon faded into anonymity. The album disappeared from circulation.[2]

For a long time Rupa remained away from the public eye until her work was rediscovered by Indian filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia, who owned a rare vinyl copy and selected the tracks "Aaj Shanibar", "Moja Bhari Moja", and "Ayee Morshume Be-Reham Duniya" for the soundtrack of his film, Miss Lovely, which competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.[2] It was also released unofficially on a German record label, Ovular.[6]

In 2014, Rupa's son, Debayan Sen, discovered an album inside his house in Kolkata, India. The album featured a picture of his mother, leading to the discovery of her buried musical career. On Google, Sen discovered that the album Disco Jazz was a rarity, selling at high prices on websites such as Discogs and was already viewed by millions on YouTube.[5] Pitchfork compared "Aaj Shanibar" to Balearic beat music, a style of house music, stating it contains "touches of what would now be considered Balearic beat music, with its expansive and hypnotic musical interludes."[5]

In April 2016, Fran Korzatowski, a music fan based in Albany, New York, identified the song "Aaj Shanibar" based on the Miss Lovely end credits and later uploaded it to YouTube.[1] A few months later, Dan Snaith discovered Aaj Shanibar on YouTube and immediately selected it for his live DJ sets and radio broadcasts on NTS and Gilles Peterson's Worldwide FM.[1] Since then, the album has been re-issued by The Numero Group, a well-established archival record label.[2] The song has been used by Loewe in Paula's Ibiza 2020 advertising campaign and by Netflix in the television series Cowboy Bebop (2021).[7]

Discography

Albums

  • Disco Jazz

Songs

  • "Aaj Shanibar"
  • "Moja Bhari Moja"[3]
  • "Ayee Morshume Be‐reham Duniya"
  • "East West Shuffle"

References

  1. ^ "BBC World Service - Outlook, My mother, India's forgotten disco diva". BBC.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i "From Bengal to boogie: Rupa Biswas, India's rediscovered disco diva | Disco". The Guardian. 21 June 2019. Retrieved 2021-12-10.
  3. ^ a b Nate Rabe. "Who is Rupa Sen and why has her Disco Jazz album become a 'holy grail' after 40 years of anonymity?". scroll.in. Retrieved 2021-12-10.
  4. ^ a b "Rupa, the voice of "Aaj Shanibar," speaks out after 40 years". Wax Poetics. 16 March 2021. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  5. ^ a b c "How a Long-Lost Indian Disco Record Won Over Crate Diggers and Cracked the YouTube Algorithm". Pitchfork. 22 January 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  6. ^ "Rediscovering Calcutta's Disco Jazz From The '80s & Its Star". homegrown.co.in.
  7. ^ "Her debut album bombed 42 years ago. Now, at 69, Rupa is finally getting the praise she deserves". Vogue. 18 April 2024. Retrieved 10 July 2024.