walking upstream…
Shankar Mahadevan
photo: bollywood hungama · cc by 3.0 ↗Shankar Mahadevan
sources for this page
Shankar Mahadevan grew up in a Mumbai household where Carnatic music was as routine as breakfast, trained on veena and vocals as a child, then spent a decade as a software engineer before the pull of the studio won out. His 1998 solo album Breathless, a single unbroken vocal take built with lyricist Javed Akhtar, made rapid, single-breath runs his signature and opened a parallel career as one-third of the Bollywood composing trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. That same classical foundation carried him into jazz fusion, where he became the fifth voice of Shakti alongside John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain. "Music is my friend, my constant companion," he has said - the thesis behind an engineer's decade away from a stage that never actually put him at a distance from one.
the sound in question
1998
BreathlessShankar Mahadevan
walk the tributaries ↓
John McLaughlin1970s–1990s · Jazz fusion / Progressive rock / World music
Mahadevan grew up decoding Shakti cassettes with friends long before he imagined joining the band: "we used to go and buy cassettes of Shakti and then analyze and decode all the phrases and complex rhythm patterns," he told AbstractLogix in 2006, months after becoming the group's full-time vocalist. He calls guitarist John McLaughlin "a complete master" and "our guiding light in the group" - the fusion pioneer whose blend of jazz harmony and Indian classical rhythm gave Mahadevan's Carnatic training an entirely new stage to work on.
listen: upstream & here
1976
2023
This MomentShankar Mahadevan
listen forOn Shakti's 1976 "Joy" and the Grammy-winning "This Moment" (2023), listen for konnakol - the rapid-fire spoken rhythm syllables of Carnatic percussion - traded like a solo instrument between voice, McLaughlin's guitar and Zakir Hussain's tabla. Mahadevan has called konnakol "one of the most amazing forms of rhythmic communication in the world"; on "This Moment," it's his own voice keeping pace with the McLaughlin lines he once decoded from a cassette.
Kishore Kumar1970s · Filmi / Bollywood playback / Indian pop
Mahadevan still frames the moment like a conversion: "the impact his voice had on my life cannot be described by way of a few words," he told the Shankar Mahadevan Academy in 2021, recalling the first Kishore Kumar song he ever heard. He ranks Kishore among his top ten singers of all time, prizing how the untrained playback legend would "render it straight" and let feeling arrive "from the heart, not through gimmicks" - the opposite lesson from his own strict Carnatic schooling. His producing partner Ehsaan Noorani later caught him applying it on purpose.
listen: upstream & here
1969
Roop Tera MastanaKishore Kumar
2011
Dushman MeraShankar Mahadevan
listen forPlay Kishore's "Roop Tera Mastana" against Mahadevan's "Dushman Mera" from Don 2 and listen for the same unhurried, full-chested delivery riding straight through the melody instead of ornamenting it. Ehsaan Noorani, who produced the track, named the debt outright: "the Dushman Mera song was a tribute to Kishore Kumar, the way Shankar sang it." The loose grain in Mahadevan's tone is the exact quality he'd singled out admiring in Kishore decades earlier - borrowed sound worn like a hand-me-down coat that still fits.
M.S. Subbulakshmi1940s–1970s · Carnatic classical / Devotional / Bhajan
Subbulakshmi shares a sentence with Kishore Kumar in Mahadevan's account of his own formation: "since my early age, I was inspired by classical musicians like ... M.S. Subhalaxmi ... Pt. Jasraj, Lataji ... and Kishore Da," he told the MTV India Music Summit in 2018 - the roll call of a south Indian household where, as he put it in the same interview, "every child is put to learn either Carnatic music or Bharatnatyam." He trained formally in Carnatic singing as a boy, the discipline Subbulakshmi had already carried to global concert stages.
listen: upstream & here
1960
Vatapi Ganapatim BhajehamM.S. Subbulakshmi
2020
Vatapi GanapatimShankar Mahadevan
listen forBoth artists recorded "Vatapi Ganapatim," the Muthuswami Dikshitar kriti that Subbulakshmi's 1960 concert recording made a Carnatic benchmark. Listen for the same unhurried gamaka - the deliberate bend and hold on each note - in Mahadevan's 2020 version. No interview ties his choice of the kriti directly to her recording; the connection is repertoire, not testimony. But the phrasing discipline he applies to it is the one most closely associated with her name.