MUMBAI: Eighties’ grunge rock gone horrifyingly off-key – isn’t that what Mumbai sounds like lately? A collective rasp of buildings being broken down, highways and metro lines being laid for posterity, of gravel being poured and pounded, compelling people to end rental leases because they are next to a “redevelopment building”.
But as I found on a busy weekend evening at the serene Godrej Design Labs in the heart of Vikhroli, if you seek out the city’s musical sanctuaries, soothing brain waves and analog wind-downs do transpire.
All for a song
The energy inside the cavernous auditorium of the Conscious Collective at Godrej Design Labs turned into an impromptu singing room. About 250 of us landed up to sing to the animated instructions of 34-year-old singer and music teacher Medha Sahi, who started The Strangers’ Choir in Goa nine months ago — and brought the party to Mumbai.
And did we sing! An anthem suited to the age, eyes dancing between our exacting conductor Medha and our sheet of lyrics, over almost three hours: Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. Faintly at first, and then in swelling joy: “Don’t it always seem to go/ That you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?/ They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
The room was electric; the bathroom line during the break was long, except with smiles exchanged.
Sahi, who teaches music out of Goa, an accomplished musician, trained in Hindustani Classical and Western Classical, wanted to replicate the Gaia Music Collective of New York. She replicates the concept: You post a call for a singing session at a venue on a WhatsApp group, and have strangers congregate to sing a song just like a choir would — divided into groups, each group assigned a pitch, and then experience, with definite goosebumps unrelated to the apologetic Mumbai winter, the final crescendo of singing the complete song.
“After the pandemic, people are looking for device-free time with other human beings. That’s my biggest takeaway from the success of the Strangers’ Choir. From a small pop-up about eight months ago, we are now doing this in nine cities,” Sahi says. The next one is in January at the Bengaluru Hubba, in Bengaluru.
With breakdown as the base emotion of our lives lately – from the dense air and rising loneliness, to the crippling wealth gap and hate-mongering, a world terrifyingly capable of breaking a soul — Mumbai’s music sanctuaries feel balmy.
Sound rises
Take the genre-agnostic SoundRise experience. Every weekend morning, much like the Hindustani classical Diwali Pahat concerts across Maharashtra, a public park in any part of Mumbai turns into a venue for music bands drawing new singers as well as those steeped in classical traditions.
SoundRise began with four friends — Mohit Chhatrapati, a finance professional, Raoul Nanavati, a tech entrepreneur, Shaan Khanna, a startup owner and Varun Narayan, an actor, singer and host — wanting to actualize a shared love for live music. What started as an experiment in October 2021, just as the world was opening up again post-pandemic, it is now on the verge of the 100th gig in January 2026 — featuring 400-plus artistes and 25-plus venues across Mumbai.
SoundRise has had musicians from jazz, rock, blues, funk, hip-hop, fusion, Sufi, ghazals, Hindustani classical, and more genres, with artistes such as Ranjit Barot, Sanjay Divecha, Ryan Sadri, Vasundhara Vee, Rajeev Raja, ensembles such as The Bombay Coalition, Many Roots Ensemble, Chizai and The Fanculos, and young and emerging musicians such as Zoe & Urgen, Yohan Marshall, Delraaz and Zervaan Bunshah.
Narayan says, “When we started out, we thought SoundRise would just be a fun little initiative — a few Sunday morning concerts in parks organised 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 drawn in by the simplicity of live music in a shared space. Soon we began to understand that it was a way to get people off their couches and away from screens, out into the open.”
A predecessor to SoundRise, but with a very different, groovy evening vibe, are the NCPA@thePark concerts that take place across open spaces and parks in Mumbai through November and December. NCPA@thePark is currently on its fifth season. Similarly, older initiatives such as classical music morning events organised by Pancham Nishaad and Shashi Vyas, son of one of Mumbai’s Khyal maestros CR Vyas, host free classical music concerts at 6.30 am across 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 Udayswar, a series at the Mumbai performing arts legend Prithvi Theatre in Juhu.
The early morning concerts are without any elaborate sound systems. “Musicians get their own instruments, and play. We try to make every concert thematic, with some purpose. Our core audience is over maybe 60, but you’ll be surprised to know about the increase in the number of young audiences over the last few years,” says Vyas, adding, “everybody today needs meditative experiences, don’t they?”
Out in the open
Anuradha Parekh, the founder and artistic director of the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, started the Morning Riyaz concerts at the foundation’s gardens around the time the pandemic began. The concerts moved online during the pandemic and began open air, early mornings, after the world came out from forced seclusion and fear.
“My idea for these concerts in intimate, informal settings, was to give audiences a peek into the practice and rigour of classical musicians,” says Parekh. There’s something about the early morning hours, Parekh says, “listening to ragas early mornings have clarity, combined with an innocence and fragility.” Morning Riyaaz, which takes place on weekend mornings, features vocalists trained in various forms of Indian classical music, each bringing their own distinctive quality to their practice. They present ragas interspersed with conversations. Some artistes who have presented at Morning Riyaz are Tejashree Amonkar, Aditya Khandwa, Keyur Kurulkar and Priya Purushothaman.
This weekend G5A is hosting a three-day music awareness event, Voice and Responsibility: A G5A Weekend with T M Krishna (co-curated by T M Krishna and Anuradha Parikh), which includes a concert by Krishna. Krishna, an Indian Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist, author and Ramon Magsaysay awardee, says, “I do hope that through the conversations and music at Voice and Responsibility, we will nudge artistes to reflect about their practice and role in a society that seems more fragmented than ever before – a society that needs artistes to stand up and ask questions.”
Coffee and rave
Sure, not like the urban folk legends and live blues bands of Kolkata, but Mumbai, a legendary Jazz City in the 1920s, has always had an appetite for live music. At one time, the Techno wave took over, followed by Afro-Sounds now.
At Mumbai’s version of Coffee Raves — a global phenomenon of morning DJ-fuelled parties over breakfast and coffee — Afro-sounds, EDMR and popular hits of Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift go with coffee and breakfast on Saturday mornings. It may be cringe for Gen X writers such as myself, but surely a high-octane start to weekends for the sober curious — in the early 2000s, recovering-alcoholics was that demographic.
Alcohol or not, Mumbai’s music communities grow, as the city ambitiously braves a transition to a city with more vertical growth, more flyovers and an ever-expanding metro network.
Human connection everywhere is more aspirational than ever. I met an advertising professional (who chooses to be anonymous) while channeling our own Joni Mitchell versions at the Strangers’ Choir. She told me why she likes to meet and connect with people over 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 children, and I’m juggling how to find work fulfilling and also earn a lot to live in Mumbai! Being happy isn’t that difficult, but real connection and community are hard to find.” The pandemic killed a lot of things, among them the banality of being around people all the time in small groups, in people’s houses and office parties. For a city of 23 million people, that means loneliness for a lot of people who come here to work and find themselves.
Singing Joni Mitchell in The Strangers’ Choir, my “high-pitched” group partners and I were fleetingly full of joy — much as I hate that word thanks to Christmas movies on Netflix. It was everywhere that evening, in that big auditorium.
(Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer.)