Very few singers have a voice like Suman Sridhar’s, even fewer have not heard of her. Anyone who possessed a sense of gravitation towards music in Bollywood that was not just pasty electronic soulless pop with the same juggernaut of vacuous romantic lyrics had, at some point, gravitated to the gravelly diction, the jazzy flairs, and the incredible work of the singer-songwriter, who has given us numbers like Fifi, and the reworks of Khoya Khoya Chand and Hawa Hawai.
Lately, however, I have taken to going back to one of her first independent releases, The Black Mamba I EP. The first of a trilogy of three song records, this EP had familiarized me with the kind of work that Sridhar was going to put out 2023 onwards : personal, ornate, and a cumulative output of what she had been hinting at through her craft for years. The record opens with Before Sleep, where she is accompanied by the spectacular Maarten Visser on the saxophone. Her voice has a rivulet like quality, as she insists on the promise of her love — repeatedly.
Sridhar knows how to nail mystery, the fine balance between being threatening and sensuous, and she accomplishes that on this one seamlessly. I find myself more intrigued by the second one, where Sridhar engages in a spoken-word rap of sorts, and this one is laced with a sardonic kind of humor — after all, you do not hear about the square foot cost of land in Panvel on free jazz everyday — and as she satirizes and frustrates herself with the ever depressing state of the present and its brutality on the cityscape. This is a remnant of the Thayil/Sridhar days — and the delivery almost paints you a picture — as if she is biting down her tongue, holding back barks in exchange of a smile.
The final track, Blow Up Dolls, is the most visceral — and clearly the best track on the EP — where Sridhar moves her voice from jazz, to infantile babbling, before finally opening up to operatic singing. As she talks about condoms for blow up dolls and schmoozing, a stunning violin solo section is riveting — by Fabrice Martinez. Something that sticks out to you through the length of the record is Sridhar’s vivacity, even when she is posing disarming critique. In a sharp critique of the sickening nature of soirees in showbiz, and the kind of contorting and dehumanization that every artist — especially women, go through the hoops of, Sridhar is almost relentlessly charming, like she is hosting a discerning callout from the brighter end of the cabaret. It takes a staggering amount of experience to vocally pull off what Sridhar does on this EP, and on her three-part opus. It also takes particular wisdom to preserve your craft in the great Bollywood homogenizing machinery and retain it strongly enough that it perseveres into your independent releases. Fortunately, Sridhar has nothing to worry about the absence of either.
