India’s Nightlife Needs More Artist-First Spaces

When you first opened The Piano Man in Safdarjung, what was the biggest fear you carried with you?

So when I opened Safdarjung, we were so new to the industry that there was a little bit of blissful ignorance, which acted as a suit of armor. But yes, of course, when you're bringing something to the market which deviates from what the market currently knows, one tends to wonder, “Are we taking the right steps? Are we moving in the right direction? Will people accept what we're bringing to the market?”, and things like that.

Did you ever feel like walking away from this path? What kept you rooted?

It's like with any journey, with any business, with every aspect of what you do, there are good days and bad days. Good days, of course, they make you feel like you're invincible, but bad days can be extremely taxing, both physically and mentally draining, and when those days come, you always wonder, Am I on the right track? You know, what usually heals me is a good night's sleep, and a perspective conversation with some of the people I look up to and that gets me back on track. What keeps us rooted is our intent, and the intent is to create a space and create an ecosystem for music, culture, performance, art, and that continues to be the driving force behind The Piano Man.

What’s one lesson from engineering that you still use while running a cultural space?

There are multiple lessons from engineering that I use on a daily basis. But more than anything else, it's the mindset, you know, the sort of problem-solving mindset that engineering is rooted in. You encounter a problem, you approach it logically, and you study it from the perspective of how you find an efficient solution to come out of it.

Has there ever been a moment when putting the artist first came at a commercial cost and you still chose art over business. Do you remember the reaction of the very first musician you hosted at The Piano Man?

Okay, both these are two questions. The first one is, has there been a moment when the artist came first at a commercial cost and you chose art over business? This happens regularly. It's not like once in a while, there are commercially successful nights, there are nights that are not commercially successful, and we have sort of built an internal wall between commerce and art. Of course, they influence each other to some extent, but the isolation between them is equally important. Once we make a decision to go ahead with a certain show, we don't allow the ‘commerce’ of that show to impact our ability to present the show.

And then, with regards to the second question, of course, I remember the first night of music at TPM. The launch night was with Latination, a phenomenal Afro-Latin band from Kolkata featuring Pradyumna Singh Manot on piano, Premjit Dutta on timbale and percussion, Bijit on bass, Emmanuel Simon on percussion. It was an absolutely spectacular evening. I remember running home just before the sound check and grabbing the carpets from my room to put on stage. They remained there for 9 years, and now they're back this week to complete the classic look of TPM! Their reaction? Well, you can ask Paddy this week, he’s coming back to play two nights for our 10th Anniversary.

If The Piano Man’s cuisine were a music genre, what would it be and why?

I would actually love to hear what my partner chef Manoj. I’d say World Music because we try to find elements and flavors from everywhere in the world and present them on a plate in a way that just works. So, delicious world music.

Do you find diners discovering new music because they came for food, or discovering new food because they came for the music?

I think it's more of the latter because our presence in the market for music is much stronger than our presence for food. That said, we're very proud of our culinary journey and we have some absolutely brilliant things on the menu that we want more and more people to come and experience.

When you look at India’s nightlife and music culture today, what worries you most, and what excites you most?

India's nightlife is moving at a breakneck speed, as is the music culture. The first thing we need is to figure out how to make independent music more commercially rewarding for artists, so that not just a few can build careers out of songwriting and independent music. Independent music is extremely important as it fuels and drives culture forward.

We also need to find ways to build a stronger framework for institutional and governance support for culture and cultural spaces.

What excites me the most is the fact that the thought process and the ideation one sees at a ground level in music is phenomenal. Indian musicians are breaking barriers. They are producing extraordinary music. And every day for me, it's just a gift to be able to listen to it.

What’s the one myth about running a music venue that you would like to break once and for all?

I think there are several myths around the economics and the ease of running a venue. It is extremely taxing, it is time-consuming, it is difficult. Yes, it is fun, but you're always on, there's no shutting down.

That's one. And the second is that it is very, very hard to make a viable culture-forward entity and we've been working for 10 years to bring it to a point where we know how to run venues viably and successfully. We’ve built a very unique set of solutions that have been designed to make the space work.

If you could take The Piano Man to one city outside India, where would it be and why?

I hope we will be able to answer this question physically at some point in the journey of the Piano Man.

I would like to open a club in some of the cities that are most famous for live music because there's one very interesting aspect of interacting with international musicians at our existing clubs. Whenever international musicians come to play at TPM, we get very consistent feedback from them that the way that we run the clubs, our hospitality, our technical expertise, our execution is far beyond many of the clubs that they've played in across the world.

Now, whether this is just international artists being kind and sweet to us or if there is something groundbreaking in the process pipeline that we have put into place, is a question I would definitely like to address. We take solace in the fact that this has been consistent for 10 years and is going.

What’s the dream collaboration you are still waiting for either a musician, a chef, or even a designer?

I imagine it’s musicians for me and chefs for Manoj. This is a very hard one because there are too many. We’ve been extremely blessed to have already hosted some of the musicians that would have been on my dream list, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea… These are artists who have inspired generations and defined genres. So I will continue working hard and hoping for such opportunities, so that I don’t need just hope, but actually get the opportunity to work with the artists we look up to.

On that note, you'll be seeing some really interesting collaborations coming up. We have an extraordinary one scheduled for this January as well. As they say, The Show Must Go On.