From performing on a fledgling jazz circuit in Delhi in the early 2000s to building one of the city’s most influential live music venues, Arjun Sagar Gupta has closely observed and shaped the evolution of India’s gig culture. Musician-entrepreneur, best known as the founder of piano man Jazz Club sat down with HT Lifestyle for a candid chat on the changing landscape of live music in the country, the psychology of building audiences and the infrastructural shortcomings that once haunted performing artistes.
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Reflecting on his music education, the challenges of setting up a large-format live venue, overcoming regulatory hurdles and nurturing talent in an increasingly crowded market, Gupta offers a 30-year snapshot of the industry and a visionary vision for where it needs to go next.
Excerpts from the interview:
What was your musical education like?
Most of my musical education took place in Delhi, at the Delhi School of Music. The principal at that time was John Raphael, who was also my teacher and I studied with him for about 18 years. In the interim period in 2007, I also had the opportunity to participate in the Fulbright Program in Boston.
The most important lesson I learned from that international part of education is how big the world is, because when you are in Delhi, especially in the early 2000s, it is a small ecosystem for live music, especially jazz or classical music. So to see musicians around the world and see the standards and expectations of what is acceptable when you’re a student of something, it was amazing. It really opened my eyes – a really good lesson because it gets your mind back into perspective.
Is there anyone who has influenced you to pursue music?
My father really likes music. I mean, if he’d had the chance, he’d have been a musician himself. When I started getting into music, there was always support available – my parents, my grandmother – which is great.
Also I think a large part of my continued interest in music was due to my teacher, John Raphael, because he did not force me to follow the standard classical music education process at the Delhi School of Music. When he realized I loved jazz he started teaching me about what I love and what makes you happy, which is not a common thing you get in an educational institution.
What inspired you to open The Piano Man? Does this have anything to do with the live music scene in India?
Absolutely. So I spent a lot of time performing, mostly in Delhi, but a little bit across the country too, and there were some big gaps in the ecosystem. There is no infrastructure at all. You start off in an uncomfortable position, using pretty B-grade quality equipment and are expected to make great music.
I don’t think I got paid for half the shows I played in my life in the early 2000s. I mean, I’ve had entire month-long contracts with venues and never seen a pen. So this was a big problem. Then again respect, for the most part, you really weren’t treated particularly well. So it was a combination of these factors, building the right infrastructure, creating the right environment and making sure there was the professionalism that we wanted to bring to the club.
How do you think the live music landscape is going in India at the moment?
So, I have a 30-year snapshot of the live music scene, right? Because 30 years ago, I was a listener, a kid who used to go to concerts in farm houses, to 20 years ago when I started being actively involved in organization, to 10 years ago when I opened my own venues and to today, where there has been a huge change in what has happened in the last 2 years.
So let me take the last 10 to 12 years. The reason we have created more space and created more capacity is because we think there is room for growth. One reason you need to build capacity is because you have a growing audience listening to live music. One of the reasons the number of audiences listening to live music grows is because you create places where they can go and experience live music and understand its importance.
It’s not just about entertainment. It is a kind of psycho-social combination of many factors. So you have the option to go there, experience live music, and make a subjective judgment on the art. When you’re listening to different things it gives you the opportunity to expand your worldview and your mind.
The audience building aspect of live music occurs at the club level because the cost of admission is low. you can go and listen to a concert ₹from 300 ₹500. It has a very low barrier of entry and is a casual environment that allows you to relax and absorb the music. I believe that music venues are extremely important in building live music audiences. What’s been happening in the last few years is that there’s been a sudden explosion of these large-format music programs in India. Now you see the world’s biggest musicians coming and playing across India. It is a beautiful thing. This is a great development compared to 10 years ago, but it also has a downside. The barriers to entry are quite high. You won’t be able to build a new audience in that environment.
People who love music and who are exactly like me, they have to go see this artist, these are the people who will go to see the artist, which is a very small part of the Indian population. Because suddenly there is oversaturation, you are seeing that big concerts, which could sell thousands of seats anywhere in the world, are not being filled in India. We are seeing that there is already a resistance prevailing in the market, where some shows have been cancelled, some shows have seen less footfall and many shows have not been successful.
Try doing something outside your comfort zone. You will only know what is outside the comfort zone if you actually go to some club, some place and listen to something, if you expose yourself to different styles, ideas and arts. What are we as a music venue? We are a venue for performing art forms for different audiences and that is why I think it is important for us to have constant and easy access and availability of music for everyone around us. So that people can come in, listen to things, make subjective decisions about whether they like it or not and it’s okay to not like something, but you have to expose yourself to it to be able to make that decision otherwise you’ll never know it exists.
What was the most challenging thing you faced while setting up The Piano Man?
I had no idea what I was doing. And I think that would have helped me a lot because if I had known how complicated it is to run a business in the country, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it. So as a first generation entrepreneur, this was green territory.
Challenges were raised from various sources. For example, a music venue is not recognized as a separate type of product in Indian compliance. From a regulatory standpoint, there are a lot of things that could be streamlined and made much easier if there were a certain methodology for establishing yourself as a music venue and not just a concert hall or a bar. So ultimately we have to combine licenses for different things, like we’re serving alcohol, so we have a bar and F&B license; We are presenting music so we are getting entertainment license etc.
How do you select the artists to perform at the venue? What do you look for in an artist?
We receive a few dozen pieces of mail per week, sometimes up to the early hundreds. I am trying to find a better system that will be able to rapidly deal with the applications that come to us. But it may still take a few weeks for us to get back to every application.
We’ve created an internal metric system for watching each performance and then based on that we respond to an artist saying we can offer them a date on our calendar. For example, if it’s a new singer-songwriter – a guy and a guitar, writing beautiful songs – can we have him on a Saturday night at one of our clubs? Not anymore, simply because the expectations of the coming audience are very different. So we are trying to base our calendar on the performances that have taken place over the years.
We are generally more comfortable with people who just send us recordings – video and audio recordings. This is usually enough for us to be able to assess because we have been doing this for a very long time.
How do you look for new talent?
Finding new talent is an extremely important part, mainly through people writing to us. GMI (Global Music Institute) holds their Songweavers annual singer-songwriter competition and we always have someone from the events team sitting there. We organize events in a lot of music schools, where we openly reach out to all the music schools in the city and host an event. For us, this is for two reasons. For one thing, kids who are studying to become musicians get a chance to play on a professional stage. And two, we get to see what’s happening at the music school level.
What’s something you want the younger generation to discover more about in music?
Listen to live music. Not just festivals, I mean neighborhood bars. Find a show once every two weeks. Don’t look at who is playing. Just go and sit there and absorb. You don’t like it, go home. No problem. It will expand your worldview in ways you can’t imagine. You will step outside of algorithmic suggestions when you are no longer pushed down a specific funnel, either by marketing or by what you have heard before. This is the way you can hear a lot, learn a lot, experience a lot, live a lot!
