The newspapers would report the next day that Sunday, the 3rd, was among the hottest days in March in a decade. Standing in the red dust of the Turf Club, the blazing afternoon sun simply felt like a fitting setting for a music festival called “A Summer’s Day”.
The desultory strumming of Siddharth Basrur’s guitar on Make Me A Sandwich floated out over the little stands selling artifacts and accessories, and the stalls serving food and (watered down) drinks to the stylishly dressed crowd at the Race Course. The crowd surged around the two stages: The Main stage, featuring Ankur and The Ghalat Family, the Karsh Kale Collectiv, M. Ward and fest headliner, Norah Jones. The second, smaller stage — the Think Pink stage, in collaboration with Women’s Cancer Initiative-Tata Memorial Hospital — would feature acts like Basrur’s, Kolkata’s Nischay Parekh and Mumbai’s Spud In The Box.
Mash-ups of Skyfall (with Kajar Bin) and Hallejulah had the crowd singing along with Apeksha Dandekar, Benny Dayal and Shilpa Rao as they performed with Karsh Kale and the uber cool Warren Mendonsa.
However, surprisingly enough, it was on the smaller Think Pink stage that many of the fest’s surprises would unfold. While Spud In The Box featured a faultless performance by the six-member band, it was the far more whimsical, eclectic tone of Nischay Parekh’s music that was the real treat. The 19-year-old musician presented material from his debut album Ocean, was backed up on percussion by Jivraj Singh, and created a great transition into the evening’s acts.
As the sun finally set beyond the big stage, strung out with fairly lights and paper birds, M. Ward (singer-songwriter Matthew Stephen Ward “from Portland, Oregon”) walked into the spotlight. The performance was patchy and the fact that it was only with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven that M. Ward really managed to get the crowd to make some noise was, perhaps, telling.
By the time M. Ward was done, the crowd, on its feet now for over four hours, was restive and chanting for Norah. And when she walked on to the stage and took her place behind the keyboard, a petite figure in blue, the cheers were wild.
She immediately launched into Happy Pills, from her album Little Broken Hearts, talked about as much for its theme of heartbreak as for Norah’s association with producer Brian Burton aka Danger Mouse. Then it was back to older material, with What Am I To You (from Feels Like Home, her second album). With the audience eating out of her hand as she spoke to them about finally standing on stage for this, her first performance in India, Norah and her band (Pete Remm on keyboard and accordion, Jason Abraham Roberts on lead guitar, Greg Wieczorek on drums and Josh Lattanzi, bass) truly hit their stride with Say Goodbye and It’s Gonna Be. The chemistry between the band was beautiful to see, especially since it’s a much newer collaboration for Norah than the one she shared with her older band — the one she had her breakout success, Come Away With Me, with (and which featured Norah’s boyfriend and musical partner, Lee Alexander).
While Norah moved to guitar for tracks like Take It Back, Chasing Pirates, All A Dream and Black, it was with Lone Star that the audience finally found a song they could sing along to. Willie Nelson, strumming along on his guitar, would have made the moment perfect.
Norah moved to the piano, and evoked smoky, rundown bars where long hours of boredom and desperation mingle in equal parts, as she covered Hank Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart. Out On The Road, Sinkin’ Soon, Miriam, Hey You and the very bluegrass-y Long Way Home quickly followed, until Norah trod familiar ground again with Nearness of You (with an extended piano solo) and Don’t Know Why — which had the crowd begging for an encore.
The band, however, changed the set-up once again for the most “country”, folksy songs of the evening: Creepin’ In and How Many Times, moving in tight around one microphone. The sound was a bit weak, the audience a tad restive, and to the several shouted requests for Come Away With Me, Norah replied with an arch, “Patience!”
And indeed, ending her set with Sunrise seemed a wise move as the crowd joined in for the refrain, calling out to Norah for more.
She obliged with a standout rendition of Stuck, which had Jason Roberts show off his wizardry on the guitar, and then, finally, the moment everyone had been waiting for: She sang Come Away With Me. It was just as perfect as it was over a decade ago when it was released. Of course, all the other music played during her 90-minute set proved that Norah and her music have travelled long, and very diverse, paths in the time since. As an artiste, she continues to experiment with her genre, and while the older songs are what her fans here love best, as her set at A Summer’s Day proved, Norah Jones has a lot more to offer.
Perhaps the music might have sounded a lot more powerful in a closed auditorium, but standing under the open skies, listening to the music that was the lazy soundtrack more carefree years, it was almost — almost — the perfect summer’s night.