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Rupa Biswas is an Indian singer who is known for her singular Disco Jazz album.[1][2][3]
Rupa Biswas | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1955 Malda Town, West Bengal, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | singer |
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]
Albums
- Disco Jazz
Songs
- "Aaj Shanibar"
- "Moja Bhari Moja"[3]
- "Ayee Morshume Be‐reham Duniya"
- "East West Shuffle"
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