Mumbai: The grunge rock of the eighties has gone terribly missing – doesn’t Mumbai feel like that lately? Buildings are being demolished en masse, highways and metro lines are being laid for posterity, gravel is being poured and rammed, forcing people to end rental leases because they are next to a “redeveloped building”.
But as I discovered at the quiet Godrej Design Labs in the heart of Vikhroli on a busy weekend evening, if you seek out the city’s music sanctuaries, soothing brain waves and analog wind-downs are to be had.
all for one song
The energy inside the cavernous auditorium of Conscious Collective at Godrej Design Labs suddenly transformed into a singing chamber. About 250 of us came to sing along to the animated instructions of Medha Sahi, the 34-year-old singer and music teacher who had started The Strangers’ Choir in Goa nine months ago – and brought the party to Mumbai.
And did we sing! An anthem fit for the era, our precise operator intelligence and our eyes dancing for nearly three hours between songs: Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. At first faint, and then beaming with joy: “Don’t it always feel like / That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? / They made heaven and made parking lots.”
The room was electric; The line at the bathroom during breaks was long, except for the exchange of smiles.
Sahi, an accomplished musician, trained in Hindustani classical and Western classical, who teaches music in Goa, wanted to emulate New York’s Gaia Music Collective. She recaps the concept: You post a call for a singing session at a location on a WhatsApp group, and gather strangers to sing the song the way a choir does – divided into groups, each group is assigned a pitch, and then the experience, while of course hair-raising, unrelated to the unforgiving Mumbai winters, is the ultimate climax of singing the entire song.
Says Sahi, “After the pandemic, people are looking for device-free time with other human beings. That’s my biggest takeaway from the success of Strangers Choir. From a small pop-up about eight months ago, we’re now doing this in nine cities.” The next one is at Bengaluru Habba in Bengaluru in January.
Breaking down what has been the bedrock of our lives lately – from the dense air and growing loneliness, to the crippling money gap and the hate-filled world, terrifyingly capable of breaking a soul – one feels at peace in the music sanctuaries of Mumbai.
voice rises
Enjoy the genre-agnostic Soundrise experience. Every weekend morning, like the Hindustani classical Diwali Pahat concerts across Maharashtra, a public park in any part of Mumbai becomes a venue for new singers as well as musical bands steeped in classical traditions.
Soundrise started with four friends – Mohit Chhatrapati, a finance professional, Raul Nanavati, a tech entrepreneur, Shaan Khanna, a startup owner and Varun Narayan, an actor, singer and host – who wanted to realize a shared love for live music. What started as an experiment in October 2021, just as the world was reopening after the pandemic, is now on the verge of its 100th event in January 2026 – featuring over 400 artistes and over 25 venues across Mumbai.
Soundrise features musicians from jazz, rock, blues, funk, hip-hop, fusion, Sufi, ghazal, Hindustani classical and more genres, including artists like Ranjit Barot, Sanjay Divecha, Ryan Sadri, Vasundhara V, Rajeev Raja, The Bombay Coalition, Many Roots Ensemble, Chizai and The Fanculos and artists like Zoe & Urgen, Yohan Marshall, Delraz and Yuva and Emerging musicians are included. Zerwan Boonshah.
Narayan says, “When we started, we thought Soundrise would be a small, fun initiative – a few concerts organized on Sunday mornings in parks by friends. But coming out of the pandemic, people were hungry for connection, and we realized that the universal language of music could play a strong role in bringing people together. A real community began to form – families, seniors, kids, runners, creatives – all attracted by the simplicity of live music in a shared space. Soon we had It started to make sense that this was a way to get people away from them, away from the sofa and the screen, out into the open.”
The precursor to Soundrise, but with a very different, groovy evening vibe, are the NCPA@thePark concerts that take place in open spaces and parks in Mumbai during November and December. NCPA@thePark is currently on its fifth season. Similarly, old initiatives like classical music morning programs organized by Pancham Nishad, son of CR Vyas, one of Mumbai’s khayal maestros, and Shashi Vyas, organize free classical music concerts at 6.30 am at city venues once every month from October to May. Vyas is also the force behind the Spiritual Morning series at the Gateway of India once every year and Udayaswar, a series at Mumbai’s performing arts giant Prithvi Theater in Juhu.
The morning concerts take place without any elaborate sound system. “The musicians get their own instruments, and they play. We try to themme every concert with a purpose. Our core audience is probably over 60, but you’d be surprised to know about the increase in younger audiences over the last few years,” says Vyas. “Everyone needs meditative experiences these days, right?”
out in the open
Anuradha Parekh, founder and artistic director of the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, started the Morning Riyaaz concerts in the foundation’s gardens just as the pandemic began. The concerts went online during the pandemic and began in the early morning in the open air, after the world came out of forced isolation and fear.
“My idea for these concerts in an intimate, informal setting was to give the audience a glimpse of the practice and rigor of classical musicians,” says Parekh. There’s something about the morning time, says Parekh, “Listening to ragas early in the morning brings clarity, but also an innocence and fragility.” Morning Riyaaz, which takes place on weekend mornings, features singers trained in different forms of Indian classical music, each of whom brings their own distinctive quality to their practice. They present the raga along with the conversation. Some of the artistes who have performed in Morning Riyaaz are Tejashree Amonkar, Aditya Khandwa, Keyur Kurulkar and Priya Purushothaman.
This weekend G5A is hosting a three-day music awareness event, Voice & Responsibility: A G5A Weekend with TM Krishna (co-moderated by TM Krishna and Anuradha Parikh), which also includes a concert by Krishna. “I hope that through the conversations and music at Voices & Responsibility, we will inspire artists to think about their practice and role in a society that seems more fragmented than ever – a society that needs artists to stand up and ask questions,” says Krishna, an Indian Carnatic singer, author, activist, writer and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner.
coffee and rave
Sure, not like the urban legends and live blues bands of Kolkata, but there has always been an appetite for live music in Mumbai, the famous jazz city of the 1920s. At one time, the techno wave took over, followed now by Afro-sounds.
At the Mumbai edition of Coffee Raves – a global phenomenon of DJ-fuelled parties over morning breakfast and coffee – Afro-sounds, EDMR and popular hits of Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift go along with coffee and breakfast on a Saturday morning. This may be disappointing for Gen
Booze or not, Mumbai’s music community is on the rise, as the city ambitiously braves the transition to a city with more vertical development, more flyovers and an ever-expanding metro network.
Human connection everywhere is more aspirational than ever. I met an advertising professional (who prefers to remain anonymous) while broadcasting our own Joni Mitchell editions in Strangers’ Choir. She told me why she prefers to meet and connect with people through music rather than dating sites and lounge bars. It made perfect sense. “I’m 43, single, and living in Mumbai to be closer to my parents. Most of my friends have kids, and I’m wondering how to find fulfilling work and still make enough money to live in Mumbai! Being happy isn’t that hard, but finding real connections and community is.” The pandemic upended a lot of things, including the normality of being around people all the time, in small groups, at people’s homes and office parties. For a city of 23 million people, this means loneliness for many of the people who come here to work and find themselves.
Hearing Joni Mitchell singing in The Strangers’ Choir, my “high-pitched” group mates and I were momentarily filled with joy – as much as I hate that word, thanks to Christmas movies on Netflix. That evening, in that big auditorium, it was everywhere.
(Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer.)
