Sonu Nigam and Bickram Ghosh talk about their friendship and more

Sonu Nigam and Bickram Ghosh on making it to the Oscar nomination list for their compositions in the film Jal.
Congratulations on being in the running for an Oscar for Best Original Score. How did it happen?
Sonu: God’s beautiful ways of surprising us... we had a chance meeting with (director) Girish Malik at a Times of India function in 2010. I had just come back from a long hiatus in America and my musicality had changed.Bickram bhai (Ghosh) and I had found each other musically and spiritually. Things fell in place and we started work on his film Jal.
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Bickram: We worked incessantly for a year on Jal, straddling between Kolkata (my studio) and Mumbai (Sonu bhai’s studio). Girish bhai wanted an ‘epic’ score with international elements yet retaining an Indianness. Since Indian instruments are essentially intimate in nature, it was not easy to juxtapose them with a grandiose backdrop. Through a lot of hard work and aesthetic judgements, this was finally achieved and we are overjoyed that the impact has been felt at the highest levels internationally.
What’s it like to be nominated alongside AR Rahman?
Sonu: AR is a dear colleague. I have worked with him for the last 17 years. And there are stalwarts like Hans Zimmer. For us, the biggest high is that this is our first work together, ours is a Hindi film, and we are not nominated in the foreign film category, but in the mainstream Oscar race!
Bickram: He is a veteran in the field of composition and has already made India proud at the Oscars. We are veterans as musicians but are debutants as duo composers.
How did you two end up collaborating as composers, coming from the same field yet relatively different backgrounds?
Sonu: Bickram bhai is one of the finest percussionists in the world, and from the field of Indian and international classical music. I’m comparatively from a very hardcore, competitive, mainstream music industry. Yet somewhere down the line, we both felt that we had never been too swayed by the behavioural and political prerequisites of our individual field of art. We were free souls, kind of purists by default, and had allowed only a small percentage of the sum total of music that we both had, for use. Thus we bonded like long lost soul mates. Music was just one of outcomes.
Bickram: It’s true that we are seemingly as different as chalk and cheese! We met through a mutual friend, Manisha Dey, who had worked as a producer with both of us and maintained that we should work together as she felt we had similar mindsets. When we finally did, we hit it off like a house on fire, chatting away for three hours. Sonu bhai sang a song for me for a film (Gumshuda). We are thick as friends and deep as musicians.
What went into the making of the soundtrack?
Sonu: We were lucky to have a director who allowed us to make music, and didn’t insist on a hit, or a ringtone as they say today! The first lines I wrote for the title of Jal, ‘Jal de jal de jaldi jal de, jalne na de jal hi jal de’ rang a bell with him. We then decided to create some melodies with a soundscape so epic that our music would set the tone for what’s going to be shot in the Rann of Kutch. Eventually, when the turn of the background score came, we completely knew where we stood and then began another journey of expressing the entire movie with sounds, percussion and exotic instruments like duduk, big drums and khanjeera.
Bickram: The backdrop was the desert lands of the Rann of Kutch. The score needed to depict the epic nature of man fighting the insurmountable odds of nature. While some ethnic sounds needed to be present from the area, the juxtaposition of all-powerful nature against the vulnerability of the individual facing the odds demanded a unique treatment of sound.
We achieved this by using the bigness of dhamsa drums, Taiko drums, string sections woven around a single instrument like an oboe, a duduk, a Tar Shehnai or a sitar. The manner of performance of these instruments was also consciously kept different to the styles we normally hear. The effect, for all those who heard it, was very poignant. International artistes like Greg Ellis (The Matrix), Pete Lockett (James Bond films) and Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles also featured along with a host of Indian artistes. Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan sahab, Suzanne and Ambarish Das are also part of it. Shubha Mudgal sang the title track.
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