The Cat's out of the bag

Five months. Three continents. A 77-city tour. Peter Cat Recording Co. is living every rocker's dream. How did they pull it off?

-  Karishma Kuenzang

Who would have thought, even a decade ago, that a five-piece Delhi band, which plays jazz-based compositions and sings in English, would launch their third album with a 77-city tour across North America, UK, Europe and India? A decade ago, Peter Cat Recording Co. was barely five years old. Now, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Nashville, LA, Montreal, Vancouver, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Zurich, London and Barcelona are on the tour. Most gigs are already sold out. My, how they've grown!

The new album, Beta, has 13 tracks and is squarely within the band's soundscape: Gypsy jazz and ballroom dominate, there's a horn section, many songs show off the musicians' Indian Classical roots. Dhruv Bhola works the bass and samples, Suryakant Sawhney is on guitar, lyrics and vocals, Karan Singh is on the drums. The band has added new instruments to the line-up since 2009. Kartik Pillai, who plays the guitars, horns and woodwind, learned saxophone. Rohit Gupta, on keys, horns and woodwind, now plays clarinet and sax, and contributed to synth bass and electronic drum sounds. "It's exciting to pick up an instrument and figure out if it fits with a song," he says.

The changes have worked. But Peter Cate Recording Co.'s success comes largely because audiences have changed too. And they make music that is at once universal and intimate.

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