JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A cult classic album that found late success may now find a whole new generation of fans.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SUMMERS: The record is called "Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat." It just got a reissue this month.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
And even though it sounds like an '80s club track, it was recorded by a musician in India years before electronic and house music were everywhere. The artist was the late Charanjit Singh.
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CHANG: Singh grew up in Bombay, where his family owned a store making instruments. But as a child in the 1940s and '50s, Singh found himself more fascinated with playing the instruments than making them, practicing up to 16 hours a day.
SUMMERS: And all of that practice paid off. Arshia Haq, co-founder of the record label Discostan, says Singh became a session musician for some of the biggest Bollywood hits.
ARSHIA HAQ: The most famous song that Charanjit was a session musician on is "Dum Maro Dum" from the film "Hare Rama Hare Krishna."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DUM MARO DUM")
ASHA BHOSLE: (Singing) Dum maro dum.
SUMMERS: Singh also composed his own music, and his desire to create something outside of the Bollywood studio system coincided with the release of one of the most popular instruments of the 1980s.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Introducing the world's most advanced rhythm machine, the Roland TR-808.
JEREMY LOUDENBACK: A Japanese company had just introduced, you know, the Roland 303, the Roland 808. So these were entirely new instruments.
CHANG: That is Jeremy Loudenback, another co-founder of Discostan. He wrote the liner notes for this reissue alongside Arshia Haq. He says Singh's album was a fusion of this new synthesizer technology and a form of traditional Indian music called the raga.
HAQ: A raga is a very well-known form to lovers of Indian classical music. Ragas are associated with different climates, different times of day, different emotions.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARANJIT SINGH'S "MEGH MALHAR")
LOUDENBACK: Like, there's one raga, "Megh Malhar." And so this one, you know, starts with these sort of synthesized thunder sounds, and it's a callback to this idea of clouds, rain, monsoon. He's translating it in this electronic context.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARANJIT SINGH'S "MEGH MALHAR")
SUMMERS: But "Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat" wasn't very popular when it released. For years, it went largely unknown to fans of both traditional Indian music and electronic music. That changed around 2010 when the album was first reissued.
CHANG: Loudenback says when more people discovered "Ten Ragas" at that time, they noticed the similarities between Singh's work and what would come to U.S. clubs a few years later.
LOUDENBACK: This record was produced in 1982. A lot of people see, you know, the start of acid house is 1987. So there was this great, you know, reckoning. Like, did Charanjit Singh accidentally create acid house? - you know, made this record so many years before. And while, you know, these two scenes were - really weren't in conversation with each other, they were - you know, these were two groups of innovators using these new instruments, dreaming up new genres of music kind of independently of each other.
JOSHUA SINGH: I'm Joshua Singh. I am Charanjit Singh's grandson.
SUMMERS: The album's later success also came as a surprise to members of Singh's own family.
SINGH: By the time the album released, he was around 71 years old. It's a funny story. He actually simply mentioned that there's an old album of his that someone has re-released. He didn't oversell it at all.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SINGH: I was in my car, and suddenly, "Ten Ragas" starts to play for the first time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SINGH: And I'm wondering who's been banging this in the car, man? And then I take the CD out, and I'm like, oh, my God, what are you saying - this is my grandfather?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHANG: And Joshua says it's music that kept his grandfather, who died in 2015, going until the very end.
SINGH: Playing on stage at 71 to a young audience was so enriching for him.
SUMMERS: He also isn't surprised by his grandfather's late career resurgence.
SINGH: The soundscape of it is modern. Everything else about it comes from a disciplined old man's mentality of excellence.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHANG: Joshua Singh works with music now as well, composing for films, and he says he's inspired by the success of his grandfather's once-overlooked electronic album.
SINGH: It was a very freeing feeling to know that, like, whatever you do, there's 100,000% possibility that it will find its audience. It will find its place in time. You've got to do what you've got to do, man.
SUMMERS: The latest reissue of "Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat" is out now from Light in the Attic records. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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