BackShillong sung blue
Rudy Wallang and Tipriti Kharbangar bring the Meghalaya capital to the world through their band Soulmate
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In their early days, there would occasionally be members of the audience in metropolitan India who would mistake the Shillong-based band as coming from Ceylon. Oh, Ceylon, they would say, Sri Lanka, accha, accha.
Rudy Wallang, guitarist-composer of the blues band Soulmate, cracks up when remembering such interactions.
Such howlers from audience members, says Rudy, are rare these days. “Sometimes, our fans even wish to visit Shillong after hearing Soulmate," says Tipriti Kharbangar, vocalist and Rudy’s girlfriend of 12 years.
As a travelling blues band from the North-Eastern state of Meghalaya, Soulmate have been around for exactly a decade. Over the years, the band has released two albums and performed at high-profile venues across urban India. They have also been on stage with guitar legend Carlos Santana and on co-billed concerts with Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker Jr and Taj Mahal.
The Shillong Chamber Choir, winner of a well-publicized talent hunt on national television in 2010, put the region in prime time focus, admits Rudy, but Soulmate too have been doing their bit through hundreds of live concerts across the nation. “Shillong gets introduced through our music," he says. The band’s debut album, released in 2004 on the music label of the entertainment and artist management company Only Much Louder, was incidentally called Shillong.
The situation now is at a significant remove from 51-year-old Rudy’s youth, when Meghalaya too, much like some other states of the North-East, witnessed armed insurgency and violence against the presence of outsiders. When the local Meghalaya-based singers of the Shillong Chamber Choir did choral interpretations of Hindi film songs on national television, greater cultural linkages were forged. This was a far cry from 31-year-old Tipriti’s own experience in school as someone who “didn’t care for Hindi films, their heroes or the music" but was hooked to American serials like The Wonder Years, beaming home via satellite signals. “All I wanted was to go to the (United) States," Tipriti owns up. “I thought it’ll be cool."
“Sadly, many people in my hometown remain unexposed to greater India. Some might even get lost in Guwahati. My own mother, for instance, does not know what I do and how we touch the lives of people with music. I get pissed off sometimes, but such attitudes keep me grounded," says Tipriti.
Soulmate view themselves as performing a double role: as cultural ambassadors of Shillong and the North-East to the plains, and as cultural ambassadors of India to the rest of the world. In the recent past, the band has performed twice in the heart of bluesland at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis (US), had two sold-out dates at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center, the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, and shared billing with legendary blues guitarman John Mayall in Jakarta, Indonesia. They’ve also performed in France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Nepal and Bhutan.
“We knew we had the blues when an elderly blues aficionado in Memphis came up to us post-concert and said we have the soul of the Mississippi in our music," says Tipriti, chuckling. Last year, while they were performing as the opening act at the Delhi concert, Rudy saw Carlos Santana gesturing to him from the wings, wanting to join Soulmate on stage. Santana went on to play the guitar on the slow tempo composition Lie. He later invited Tipriti to sing two songs from his own set and went on record describing Soulmate as the future.
It is a dreamscape falling into place for Rudy, who was first introduced to King’s music when his friend, the musician Arjun “AJ" Sen, gave him the album There Must Be A Better World Somewhere. That was nearly three decades back.
Since then, Rudy has been with Shillong-based bands Great Society and Mojo, introduced the blues to the gospel-singing backing vocalist in Mojo, Tipriti, and in between, they fell in love.
The duo was united by grief—Rudy was coming off a “bad marriage" and Tipriti a “traumatic teenage past"—and separated in age by 20 years. It was the right pitch for the blues, says Rudy.
It’s finally about love. “I was so young and some people told me that I was being his mistress," recalls Tipriti. “But we’ve proved them wrong with music and love."
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