So after about a year of meeting and putting song ideas together and getting things in place, we finally are ready to unleash ourselves on the whole wide world! or atleast our circle of friends.

We have always wanted to play our first show for our friends whom we personally invite and ask for their feedback after the show and while we planned to do it initially in Jason’s house, we thought of Opus and the Sunday brunch was just too perfect a chance to pass up

So tomorrow, we premiere a lot of the original material we have written (we’ve written enough for a full length album BTW) and a couple of covers we thought would be fun to do! and we’d love to have some feedback from the everyone who comes to the show about the band and the music and what you liked and more importantly, what you din’t like!

If you are in Bangalore, please do consider this a personal invitation to come to Opus at 2 PM and watch Allegro Fudge’s debut show and after that, please do take some time to send us mail, or just post a comment or even catch one of us and tell us what you think of it all!

Website – http://allegrofudge.com

Email – music@allegrofudge.com

I din’t hesitate a moment and we readily agreed to give out the music for the film. I completely forgot about that film and it was only yesterday at the TFA awards, where Ram had been shortlisted for an award in the creative writing category, that I met him and he told me that the short film was complete and was uploaded onto Youtube and asked if I had seen it!

A quick search brought the film up and I must say I love the way its turned out, though Ram vehemently states that its not how they intended it to turn out, I like the feel of the film and considering that this was shot with almost no budget with a simple handy cam and all actors in the film doing this as a hobby, its a really nice effort!

Check it out yourself and let me now what you think! Also, If you haven’t yet done it, please go and download the Phenom album from our site, its dated now, but the songs are still very nice

Direct Link to the film – http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZx8A-OERY

The TFA music awards this year received about 44 entries this year and 6 bands which included Another Vertigo Rush (the eventual winners), Kastadyne, us and 3 other bands were shortlisted by the judges for commendation.

Another Vertigo Rush went on to win the award which was a choice of either 50k in cash or a record deal with Counter Culture Records and equipment worth 15k from Onstage Music. I seriously hope they choose the record deal! The cash will come with time, for now its very important that they stick to the music and put it out right.

Coming to the awards themselves, this was one of the most wonderfully organized awards I have seen in a while! the setting was beautiful, the program short and crisp and it was all about the arts and the awards. There weren’t too many unnecessary speeches and infact when I had to go up and read out a message on behalf of Counter Culture Records, I was only the 2nd person on stage talking who was not an award winner!

A fitting tribute to a brilliant young man, Angirus ‘Toto’ Vellani, who is now a legend in the Indian Indie Rock circles. The awards are one of the few around that are actually about the arts and not about some brand or some publicity stunt. These people genuinely care and a lot of good is to come from TFA. That much is for sure!

Thanks Anmol and Sarita Vellani for putting this together every year! I have been attending the awards for the past 4 years now, right from the days in Crossword and this was by far the best! yet!

Firstly, I must start this with a round of thanks to Tasneem Vahanvaty, the co-ordinator of the awards for India and so much more at the British Council, India! She forced me to put in my application last year and was there to answer any queries I might have had along the way! And while I am at it, Claire De Brackeleer for all the help provided in the UK! It would never have been possible without either of you!

The application form itself is quite a questionnaire and they have smartly left the questions very non-specific to a particular project that you might have worked on. This means that you have a LOT of introspection to do and you get to pitch yourself for the award. It took me about a week to just fill up that form and get all my references in place, but I was glad I put that time in for it because ultimately when I had to make my presentation, it was all just a breeze!

London was a once in a lifetime adventure for me! It was the first time I had travelled out of the country by myself and there was just SO MUCH to do that I feared I would not want to come back at the end of it The British Council had taken the most excellent care of us and much to the surprise of EVERYONE I know, the finalists were put up in the Leceister Square area of London, the most central, most vibrant place in London!

Our schedule was packed with meetings with various different people from the music industry in London who gave me a whole new perspective to the entire music business. Like I realized after discussions with them, what we see in India today with regard to the Indie music business is what the scene was in London about 20 or so years back! And also, with technology and opportunity becoming more and more widespread, the gap can be closed very quickly!

All the finalists got to head to Liverpool and Manchester for a different perspective from the people who run their businesses from there. But the underlying thread that we saw in all conversations was how people from every single domain in the music business take thier work so seriously and how there is value attached to every little bit of work that goes in! Something that has to start and grow in India.

Many of the friends I made in London and in the trip across the UK, have been very helpful to me over the course of the year when I sucessfully shaped my career in the music businessand the few partnerships that have formed and are forming show a LOT of promise! Infact, if I was to sum up the whole experience of the Young Music Entrepreneur award in one word, it would be ‘PROMISE’. And I would like to thank everyone from the British Council for doing their bit in showing us that promise!

Go over and read my “Thank You” list for everyone who has helped me win this award. And if you are doing something interesting in music in India today, then please head to the British Council Website and get the forms and apply at once! Its well worth your time

http://www.britishcouncil.org/india-arts-yme-award.htm is the link you want to head to now!

The new year was brought in just the way I like it! I went for midnight mass with the family and then headed to spend time with Shilpa. We even made pizza ourselves! I like this over the partying and the madness! And the rest of the year was going to get crazy anyway .. and it did

It was by complete accident that I started taking photographs at weddings. I carry my camera around with me all the time and when I first took some photos at my friend’s wedding, it was because I wanted to keep myself occupied! Some of the couple’s friends had made a movie about their life together and wanted to show it at the reception and since I had both my camera and my mac with me, I took a couple of hundred photos (like I do always), transferred them to my mac and ran a slideshow on the projector that was set up for the movie! This became such a great hit because a typical wedding photographer would take a month after the wedding for you to see the photos even and here guests who came in a little later could see what had happened earlier in the reception!

I started getting offers to shoot weddings which I still don’t take up for money. I am just not good enough yet and am still doing this as a hobby and for only my close friends. But then, sometime later this year, I should possibly start charging for it

Much to my liking, a LOT of music happened this year, with the new project (tentatively named – Allegro Fudge) that is making some very interesting music, to playing with old friends at Opus and other places around the city to the lovely ‘Raghu Dixit Project‘, its been a time when I grew a lot as a musician and I hope that will continue right through.

February 26th, 2008 was when The Raghu Dixit Project’s debut album was launched and from there its been a crazy ride with the band this year. From being MTV’s artist of the month, to seeing our album for sale in stores, to playing all over the country and some parts of the world, being part of the Roots Music Festival tour of the North East of India, to travelling around 5 countries in South Asia, to being part of a superhit movie score, my journey in music with Raghu has been tremendous this year! And I only hope next year will top it and will see me get better with the bass guitar!

This is my favourite picture of the band on stage taken this year. This was taken by Sayan ‘The Red Bantoo’ Datta, who is one of the best concert photographers I have met in the country!

The trip to the North East of India that I went on with the band, was more than just the music for me. It was a great lesson in management and I learnt more on that one trip about how to organize concerts, negotiate with people, delegate work, get work done, and just manage things than I have learnt in the past 25 years of my life! From the accident to having to set up promotional deals with radio stations in the North East and making sure things were on track in a place I have never been to in my life, in a language I don’t understand was quite an experience!

It was on this trip that I spoke extensively with Vijay Nair about the various things that we can in the realm of Indie music in India. Many of those ideas are being brought to fruition as we speak . This was also the trip that fuelled my leaving IT and eventually landing up where I am today. We’ll come to that in a bit.

2008 was the year that I was finally able to do music and work in the music biz a little more seriously and a large part of that was because of winning the IYME award for India. That was one of the best experiences I’ve had all year. I got to go to London, Liverpool and Manchester and see how the music industry works there and make friends and contacts that will be invaluable to me as I continue on this path in the music biz.

2008 was in many ways, the year for travel! Most of this was not purely travel, but I did get to see a LOT of the world and I am thankful for it. I will seriously invest time and money in travel over next year and the years to come. Its just the best thing in the world I should tell you! I used to be this person who completely disliked travelling on IT work because you are going to be stuck in an office in another country like you are now and it will only be a change of location. But I strongly urge you to travel when you can and do it NOW! go to as many places and see the world .. there is a lot you will learn

2008 was the year I finally quit IT! to pursue a life and career in the music industry and as a great first step, a series of co-incidences and great timing made me the VP for MuckWork and getting to work with Derek Sivers can be a great start to a career in the Music Biz and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am for it. More updates on how everything progresses will be made as things happen. But I am finally doing what I LOVE from my heart and its a great place to be and I am determined to make this count

There are a lot of interesting projects I am part of in the Indie Music scene in India and I will tell you about them as they happen. Right now its all just concepts but they will come together soon.

The project that started it all was relaunched late this year and I am really proud of what we have got here. The brand new RadioVeRVe now has more music and a LOT more features. I strongly recommend that you check it out and tell me what you think about it. This is just the start for the new RadioVeRVe. There is more that will go there and it will happen soon!

Another great project that I was part of late this year was FOSS.in. It was haphazard to start with, ambitious when it came close and finally when it happened, it was grand! there is a lot we did right this year, a LOT we didn’t and we learnt with everything that din’t go as planned. The team ‘bash’ after the event was quite an event and I hope that it makes us strong as a team together because there is a LOT of good that will happen with the event next year

Finally, Shilpa and I have been together for almost 5 years now and I could not have been happier about it! this has been the year when we grew a LOT closer to each other. When it was smooth sailing almost all year long The year when we started respecting our own space and learning or rather getting used to each one doing our own thing and not having to be around each other all the time. In many ways, that has been the secret to how close we’ve become.

This was also a year when I reconnected with a lot of old friends, made new ones, started many new projects and got qutie a bit of work done and enjoyed every moment of it. In a tremendous number of ways, this has been the best year of my life yet and I see a lot of good happening in 2009 as well. There have been many things I have forgotten to mention and I am sure they will come back to me soon and I’ll probably make new posts about it!

For now, cheers to a great year and here’s another one hoping for an even better year ahead

This is one hell of a story! and it has to start with this story! Because this is the coolest story of my musician life yet

Sometime late in 2006, I was travelling back from Delhi (after playing at the India Social Forum) with The Raghu Dixit Project and on the plane back to Bangalore, I bumped into Debbie.

See, at that time, I hadn’t travelled too much by flights and so I was not too familiar with how things work and for the first few flights that I took, I was stuck to my seat and just looking out of the windows most of the time and reading my books or listening to my iPod.

So anyway, being bigger than average Indians, I usually don’t fit too well in airplane seats and so try to sit next to the aisle and put at least one leg out and stretch it! so there I was stretched out and trying to get the most comfortable position I could find and the guy next to me had to go to the loo. Instead of getting out and sit right there and have to move again for him when he returns, I just moved off to the next row of seats and sat next to Debbie!

Debbie was trying to get her bottle of mineral water to open with no avail and asked me to open it for her. From there, we started talking and she was coolness personified! right from being in the US navy in operation desert storm to being a roadie for tons of rock bands on their tours including at one time, “Grateful Dead” to being an art school major to getting tattooed to the complete blonde act to earning obscene amounts of money in the IT industry!! “Groovy!” was one of her phrases along with “Yeay!! Whooo” and she used those for every little thing!

So we land in Bangalore and the hotel had forgotten to send her a cab, so I end up dropping her to her hotel and she forgets her wallet in the car which I promptly take back to her hotel and return to her. We chat some more and then decide to meet for dinner! So Shilpa and I took her to Samarkhand that night for some food she has not eaten! And we had a blast!

So anyway, I told her about the band I played for and how I was planning to at that time take music more seriously and getting myself a good guitar was part of that plan. And she told me how she knew a friend of hers who ran a music store in California and she’d see if she can help with it.

Once she went back to the US, she got her friend to arrange for a couple of different models of Warwick Guitars to be present in the store, and then drove over 200 miles to pick up my very good friends and bandmates from Phenom, Mrinal and JD and took them to the store where Mrinal picked this guitar from the different models that were available.

Debbie then paid for that guitar and drove Mrinal and JD back to their place 200 miles away with the guitar! A total journey of close to a 1000 miles and she has paid for the guitar at this point!

When I heard what happened, I din’t know how to react!! I’ve never known a relative stranger do this much for someone they met over a weekend in another country! Debbie later told me that she just had this very good feeling after meeting me in India and that this was her way of paying me back for the ‘help’ I had provided when she was in India – which included taking her out for dinner and dropping her from the airport to her hotel! I was blown away by this gesture!!

I did pay her back in full and Shilpa’s (then to-be) brother-in-law Dominic, got the guitar down with him when he came to India from the US and I was able to hold the guitar in my hands on the 22nd of December 2006!

And that was just the start to the brilliant journey I have had as a musician with that bass guitar! Its been the most cherished thing I have ever bought in my life and I am sure it will be for a LONG LONG time!

So coming back to the story, the guard who stopped me, took my ticket and started asking my name and my age and where I am from and all that and then said what are you going to Bombay for? to which I replied, “I’m going on work!” and he looks at me and says to me, “No chance! you don’t work .. there is no way you work!”

After much debate, I told him, its true, I am a musician and that probably explains my long hair and “non work” attire! That satisfied his curiosity and as he let me go ahead after thoroughly going through the contents of my bag he said .. “The minute I saw you only I knew, you must be a musician or something, there is no way you do ‘work’”!

Little do they know!

Please sample the music yourself here and tell me what you think of it. These are the first 3 songs we recorded in our pianist, Jason’s house. Its been mixed and mastered by him!

1. Maximum City – [audio:Allegro_Fudge-Maximum_City.mp3]

2. Plight – [audio:Allegro_Fudge-Plight.mp3]

3. Constant Paralysis (Spanish Song) – [audio:Allegro_Fudge-Spanish_Song.mp3]

We need a name for the band and we just can’t agree on any names that we have come up. So I need you to help me find a name for the band!

Please listen to the songs and come up with a name you think will describe the band best! Some things to keep in mind when selecting a name

- Please try to ensure there isn’t another band by that name already! (Search for the name on MySpace)

- We would love it if you can find us a name where we can register the .com, .net or .in domain for it!

If your name is selected as the band name, we will list you with muchos thanks on our website and album and give you a free copy of our first album signed by the band and personally delivered to you!

The musicians in the band are

Noella D’sa – Vocals

Joey Sharma – Guitars

Jason Zachariah – Piano / Keyboards

Rzhude David – Percussions / Vocals

Gaurav Vaz – Bass Guitar

The show has been postponed to the 24th of December, 2008.

[End of Update]

After a LONG LONG hiatus, The Raghu Dixit Project is all set to play in Bangalore later this month. We are playing at Opus on the 24th of December 2008. There are other shows that might happen which are not confirmed yet!

I will update you chaps with information about the shows that are open to public and while I will remind all of you again, please do keep yourselves free and if you are in Bangalore on those days, please make it for our shows and stop by to say Hi! after.

I have been an amateur musician for about 8 years now and a large part of my education as a musician happened playing in the various venues in and around Bangalore. These were either college fests where my band Phenom competed or pub gigs where we played for measly sums of money, some places where we even had to pay and play but play we did! and we loved it and it was well worth it!

In a city where venues to play musc are few and far between, the few places that allowed bands to play were our saving grace! to us, the 20 people who were our audience, most of them friends we had dragged there, were the closest we would ever get to those videos of our favourite bands who would woo stadiums filled with people!

In one swift and stupid move, my city was culturally slaughtered last month! in a very strange twist of events, the Bangalore police banned live music in places that serve alcohol. Bad enough, they had banned dancing in clubs, they had to go do this ..

In many ways, I got out of this situation with my band now playing largely outside Bangalore inspite of being a Bangalorean Band! but its the worst feeling for those kids who put their heart and soul and every penny they can muster into their music. Like Girish Karnad, one of the finest playwrights from Bangalore had to say at the protest last weekend, “How on earth will listening to live music cause anything untoward to happen?” and just because accidents happen on the road, will you ban driving?

This is the 21st Century and we live in a free country but are still subject to such ridiculous restrictions that it makes me question the ability of the people who we have elected into power!

A bunch of us have put up a petition for online signing that we would like to take further once we have enough people supporting the cause. So if you feel what is happening in the city now is unfair, please head to http://bengalurubleeding.com/petition and support us!