Asha Puthli

Vocalist and songwriter Asha Puthli was well known in her native India before emigrating to New York in the late 1960s. She made a splash in the U.S. jazz world after appearing on Ornette Coleman’s seminal Science Fiction in 1971. Further, she anticipated several major developments in Western popular music with her four albums for CBS Europe. 1976’s The Devil Is Loose showcased her slinky vocals deployed above pulsing electronic beats and a bumping bassline in sexy Euro-disco. She focused on acting and modeling during the 1980s but returned to recording with 1990’s Hari Om. Later that decade, she issued The New Beat of Nostalgia. Sampled often by rappers and dance music producers, Puthli became a forerunner of the East-West fusion dance styles so popular among clubgoers in Britain. A boundary crosser in music and life, she returned to performing in 2006 and released Lost in 2009. In 2019, she was a featured collaborator on Tuscan singer Gabriel Grillotti’s single “Je Crois C’est Ça L’amour.”