Busk And You Shall Receive

The streets are alive with the sound of music.

On this Friday evening, the skies of the city were overcast and heavy. A few stray drops of water graced us, but the monsoon shower seemed to be holding back out of kindness for the musicians. On 24 July, One Shobha on Church Street lay open for a new kind of gathering, in memory of a certain Ed Sheeran who took to the same street many moons ago, and was immediately booted off for a ‘lack of permission’.

A makeshift stage occupied the empty space on the boulevard opposite Empire restaurant, with people gathered around it. As we waited for the show to start, there was chatter and a general wandering. Next to us, Paragon’s appam kiosk saw good business. It was clear that something was going on, it was also clear that you could come and go as you please.

‘The Music Scene’ as coined by UnboxingBLR, is the city’s first attempt at making space for ‘busking’, when artists or musicians perform on the street to ‘seek’ money. Koushik BS, who is on the team that planned the event, pointed out that, “Playing music on the street for money is directly thought of as begging,” but busking is meant to give artists a free platform to engage with audiences.

Right on track

And it’s true. The evening began with Ashwin Kurian and Debjit Sarkar’s take on Carnatic music, followed closely by Praveen Alva’s Tulu Folk songs. Loysum and MangoPickL then took over with their edgy performances that reimagined hunger and heartbreak. Praveen, who is the vocalist of Alva Kuuto, told us later, “I could see that people stayed back so that [gave me] a lot of strength,” Praveen is used to open mic setups and knows how to work a crowd. But what kept him going is that busking is basically the “reinforcement [of] the Bangalore culture of having an audience for everything.”

While the crowd kept rotating, some people stayed for the entire three-hour block of music. One man stood alone throughout the entire performance, grinning ear to ear as he listened to the artists. When the emcee handed him the mic to sing a couple of lines, he sang two lines in Arabic, telling the audience then that he was all the way from Egypt, and “was really enjoying the show.”

Each act was unique, and very Bangalore. Praveen also pointed out that “this kind of activity reinforces [artists] or people who are on the fringes. [For those] who are mostly into listening to film songs, these [events] will pull them into the indie scene.” While picking the artists too, the UnboxingBLR team looked for performers who had a healthy following on social media but wanted a platform to really showcase their work. Audiences were also free to give each artist a ‘tip’ through the QR code visible at the edge of the stage.

Finding the groove

Busking is usually a practice common to Europe and her neighbours. Bangalore’s traffic-jammed roads are perhaps not conducive to singing on the streets and gathering huge crowds. So when they first began ideating, UnboxingBLR got in touch with someone from the London Mayor’s Office, because as Sashwat Kumar from UnboxingBLR learned, “London is [one of the] first cities in the world to legalise busking,” even normalised to the extent that artists end up making hundreds of pounds for one performance.

The hub-hub of Church Street (if not Majestic metro station), is perhaps the closest that Bangalore can get to the buskers’ London. Malini Goyal, the founder of UnboxingBLR described Bangalore’s “very rich tradition of live music,” including open air gigs, concerts, and the many venues now mushrooming in the city. Malini pointed out that while “the music scene has dimmed” in the last two decades, there have been countless attempts at reviving a culture that asks as much from its audiences as it does the musicians. UnboxingBLR then decided to give musicians this “democratised platform to perform.”

When they put out a call for artists, they received “over 1,600 comments,” and about 250 artists filled out the form, “so there is more than enough supply.” At the end of the evening, we left with names of the artists bookmarked on Instagram, singing along to Loysum’s, “I want some cheese on my maggi.”

The details: Visit ‘The Music Scene’ at One Shobha on Church Street, every Saturday, between 5–8 pm. Visit their Instagram for more information.

Drishti Rakhra is the Senior Editor at LURU.