Aki Kumar’s Bollywood Blues (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

Still, he had to overcome some hurdles. “One of those was my accent,” he admits. “Another was that as an international person, you’re preemptively perceived as an outsider: not a ‘real American,’ singing American music to people who are very well-versed in it.” But he worked hard at his vocals, harmonica and stagecraft, winning over audiences.

At his day job, he found tech work mind-numbing. “You’re basically sitting on a chair, scrolling through 10,000 lines of [software] code that you didn’t write – that were written in 1994 by some guy much smarter than you – and you’re trying to find the two lines in there that are causing a problem,” he explains with a laugh. “The one great thing was that I was able to listen to Little Walter [on headphones] all day.” As his music career picked up steam, Kumar quit his tech job, devoting his passions full time to the blues.

With blues band Tip of the Top, Kumar released Depot Street Blues in 2009, followed by Rock Tonight (2010) and 2011’s From Memphis to Greaseland, recorded at Kid Andersen’s famed studio in San Jose. In 2014 he released his solo debut, Don’t Hold Back; that record was followed up months later by It Takes Three, a collaboration with Gary Smith and Kumar’s teacher David Barrett.

By the time he signed with Little Village in 2016, Kumar had developed a way to incorporate the sounds, sensibilities and atmosphere of his Indian heritage into the blues idiom. The result was 2016’s Aki Goes to Bollywood. Another album for Little Village, Hindi Man Blues built on that hybrid foundation; it won effusive praise in the pages of Living Blues, Downbeat and other publications.

In 2021, hometown paper San Jose Mercury News described Kumar as the Bay Area’s “reigning king of Bollywood blues.” While that label conveniently overlooked the fact that there weren’t many (if any) other artists exploring that particular style of music, the praise was genuine. In 2024, Kumar and his band won a Metro Silicon Valley readers’ poll, earning the distinction of Best Local Band.

“I don’t like popularity contests,” Kumar says. “But it felt great, because I work very hard in the Bay Area scene.” Kumar plays between 150 and 200 shows a year; “I keep the band working,” he says.
One of the most recent fruits of his hard work is Kumar’s fourth album for Little Village, the sardonically-titled God Bless the USA. With this release, Kumar found an outlet to express his passionate views on issues of social and political importance. And while its title might suggest some kind of jingoistic paean to conservative talking points, God Bless the USA is something else entirely.

Kumar explains that the title is an intentional red herring. “That’s the point: to draw people in out of curiosity,” he says. “But the message is clear once you listen to the [title] track. And the song mentions the USA, but the truth is that the [message] of the song – about the class divide and this era of hyper-greed – apply across the universe. And I wanted it to have a hook, so everybody can sing along in an ironic way.”

Against a backbeat that suggests a Celtic waltz played by an Americana/rock ensemble, in “God Bless the USA” Kumar sings in a voice halfway between earnestness and sarcasm: “The rich shall inherit the Earth; that’s what our scriptures say. You’re measured by your money’s worth; God bless the USA.”
Aki Kumar makes his position plain throughout the album. “Thoughts and Prayers” is a likely-apocryphal tale of writing a letter to the president pleading for action to prevent school shooting, and receiving a reply offering instead merely thoughts and prayers. The tune’s musical backing has a classic pop feel reminiscent of Toots Thielemans, with a subtle gospel feel applied to its modern blues foundation.

God Bless the USA also features what might be thought of as an unusual choice of covers. Punk heroes the Clash featured “Should I Stay or Should I Go” on their 1981 album Combat Rock. And while guitarist and songwriter Joe Strummer shied away from making claims about its lyrical significance, the song seems custom-made to be sung by an immigrant worried about his status in the Trump-era United States.

And that’s the approach that Kumar takes on his reading of the Clash gem. With a loping blues backing, he reinvents the song, giving it a feel that’s classic blues, but with a vocal emphasis that leans into the uncertainty that plagues many in the U.S. who might not have been born here.

The Indian instrumentation of Kumar’s “Desi Strut” effectively bridges East and West, with a sound that suggests both The Meters and Ravi Shankar. But then that approach is a central theme of God Bless the USA.

Kumar produced God Bless the USA on his own, working at home. “I have a great studio – Greaseland, just a hop away from where I live,” he says; that’s where most of his earlier albums had been cut. “But when the pandemic hit, I had to do a bunch of live streaming, so I set up a studio in my garage.” With a laugh, Kumar admits that said “studio” was really just “a bunch of my gig mics placed on top of the amplifiers, with two over the drum kit.”

Working with home studio software GarageBand, Kumar recorded all of the 13-song album’s harmonica, and lead vocals, plus a good bit of percussion. He brought in a dozen hand-picked musicians to provide, guitar, bass, keys, saxophone, tabla, khanjira, and sitar. The resulting album bears none of the homespun hallmarks of a DIY effort; it’s a superbly-produced and -played collection of songs that synthesize his love of the blues with his Indian roots.

While Aki Kumar’s latest album is superbly effective at delivering pointed sociopolitical commentary, its complementary strength is its showcasing of his skill at combining musical styles that – on paper, at least – shouldn’t fit together seamlessly. But in his creative hands, with God Bless the USA Aki Kumar has found a way to bring Bollywood flavor to the blues, and do it in a way that sounds like the most natural thing in the world.