For months, Indian vocalist Asha Puthli has hauled a suitcase-size portable karaoke machine out of her condo in West Palm Beach, Fla. The septuagenarian lifts it onto a minibus that takes her to the recreation room at her retirement complex, where she sets up the machine — a gift from her new record label — to rehearse from her catalog to an empty hall. “It was pretty tough to find a big-enough machine that I could still take to the clubhouse,” she laughed.
“I went to one karaoke club in Palm Beach. They had all the standards on there, but, of course, they didn’t have any of my songs.” Puthli’s career has taken her through smoky Mumbai jazz clubs and a hippie camp at Woodstock; dishing with Andy Warhol and being dressed by Halston and Manolo Blahnik as she sashayed through Studio 54 in New York City.
She’s sung with sax giant Ornette Coleman and battled Sean “Diddy” Combs over unlicensed sampling. She’s also struggled financially at times and hasn’t toured in 40 years. Although she lived in Los Angeles for five years in the 2010s, Puthli has never played here.
Until Thursday, that is, when she’ll finally headline a sold out show at the experimental L.A. music club Zebulon.
The show is a very-late-career laurel for an Indian artist who has entranced and defied music industries on three continents for decades. Her life and music embody the fascinated, fraught exchanges of pop culture between Asia and the West. After an adoring re-mix project from an .