Last year, at 79, Indian disco diva and musical experimenter Asha Puthli returned with her first major tour in four decades. As the tour continued into summer 2025, Puthli has received her long overdue flowers.
Puthli immigrated to New York City at 24 and contributed widely to its art and music. While her disco-laden third album, 1976's The Devil Is Loose, is her most well-known and has been coveted by crate-diggers for years, her rich, eclectic catalog (a good chunk of which is not available on streaming) and career are also ripe with innovation, gems and inspiration. Throughout her career, Puthli has boldly carved her own path and painted by her own colors.
"Free is the only way you can live, being true to yourself. Break the rules if you have to; break the taboos where you think there is no justice," Puthli asserted in 2024.
Puthli has a five-octave vocal range, a playful, chic fashion sense and an eye for the glamourous, colorful and avant-garde in all she does. She was a regular at Studio 54 and was in Andy Warhol's ultra-hip crew. Despite her presence in NYC's rich '70s creative scene and the impact her music and style had on it, she never became a household name. Yet her influence never faded, finding its way into '90s hip-hop via samples of her 1976 classic "Space Talk," record collections, DJ sets and remixes, and as a muse for younger generations of South Asian artists like Raveena.
In celebration of Puthli's resurgence and continued touring bringing her sensual, funky, jazzy global sound around the world, GRAMMY.com reveals some of Puthli's magic and influence.
She Got Her Start In Indian Music & Jazz
Puthli was born in Mumbai in 1945 to traditional (yet activist) parents. She studied Indian classical music and dance, learning the hauntingly powerful Jaipur-Atrauli gharana style of singing, which she later brought to her music and to fellow disco divas. (She claims her vocals were referenced when Donna Summer recorded her disco classics.)
She fell in love with jazz through Voice of American radio broadcasts, performing backwards at local clubs in order to hide her face and her love for western music.
"The [jazz] improvisations represented freedom in every sense," Puthli reflected in the The Guardian last year.
Since passports were difficult to acquire in India at the time and she wanted to pursue her love of jazz, she became a flight attendant to gain freedom and hear the music live in London. She then won a dance scholarship in New York, a move that would change her life forever. In 1970, a year after moving to the Big Apple, John Hammond — who also championed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen — signed her to Colombia Records and had her perform with free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman.
She sang on "What Reason Could I Give" and "All My Life" on Coleman's wild, avant-garde 1972 album Science Fiction — the first time he worked with a vocalist. Thanks to her captivating, dexterous performance on the cutting-edge album, Puthli was named the "best female jazz vocalist" alongside Ella Fitzgerald by the DownBeat Critics’ Poll.
She Made Her Mark In NYC
Puthli was a regular performer and guest at Studio 54 and a radiant presence in NYC's music, art and fashion scenes. In fact, her groovy nearly-eight-minute jam "Music Machine," from L'Indiana, released in Europe in 1978 and the U.S. in 1979, was dedicated to Studio 54. "Give me your music / give me your love / dance with me forever!" Puthli demands atop an unrelenting disco beat.
Her sense of style was recognized by Halson, Bob Mackie, Manolo Blahnik and other iconic designers who offered her glamorous dresses to wear. Andy Warhol photographed her alongside Francesco Scavullo, Mick Rock, David Bailey, Clive Arrowsmith, Norman Seeff, Herbert Migdoll and Richard Avedon. The latter's stunning image of her was immortalized on the back cover of her 1975 sophomore album She Loves To Hear the Music and as the cover art for The Essential Asha Puthli compilation released by U.K. indie Mr Bongo in 2022.
"Space Talk" was a favorite track of David Manusco at his iconic intimate, hi-fi Loft parties — a deeply influential fête that set the tone for clubbing and sound systems in the city and beyond. And while Puthli herself went quiet in the '90s, the futuristic sound of "Space Talk" took on new life as it added deep groove to hip-hop. It was sampled by Biggie ("The World Is Filled…") and G. Unit ("The World"), made its way to Atlanta via Jermaine Dupri and Jagged Edge ("Girl Is Mine"), and flew to the West Coast via the Pharcyde ("Drop").
"I'm very, very much in gratitude for all the crate-diggers, the samplers, the hip-hoppers. They've kept longevity on some of those songs… that span over five decades now," Puthli toldVice Australia in 2024. "I’m inspired by their enthusiasm, energy, sense of humor, joie de vivre, just everything."
The Devil Is Loose Is An Underground Disco Classic
The Devil Is Loose is as iconic and noteworthy as its most popular track, "Space Talk." On the 1976 album, Puthli finally got the creative freedom she craved and thrived in — writing the lyrics to every song but one while working in Berlin with a more understanding producer, Dieter Zimmermann. It seamlessly meshes disco, jazz, psych rock and beyond, opening with the delightfully strange but funky "Flying Fish."
At the time, The New York Times lauded the album and Puthli's talent, even though it wasn't available stateside where she lived. "The Devil Is Loose is new — nobody has combined disco, jazz‐rock, influences from gospel music and India, introspective lyrics, funk rhythms and massed voices before — but it is not ahead of its time. It sounds thoroughly our time," the paper effused. " Miss Puthli has the potential to become a major artist; if American CBS continues to ignore her, the company will be making a mistake."
In fact, CBS couldn't see the gold in front of them and never released the record in the U.S., hence its prized (and hard-to-find) status among crate-diggers. (The U.S. arm of CBS dropped Puthli when she was pregnant with her first child in 1975.) When Mr Bongo reissued the record in the U.K. and U.S. in 2021, The Devil Is Loose finally became available stateside — 45 years after its original release.
Puthli Was The Disco Diva Blueprint
The Devil Is Loose was arranged by Dave Virgin King, an American expat living in Germany. King played bass and synth on Puthli's release and on Donna Summer's equally iconic (but much more famous and widely released) "Love To Love You Baby." Puthli asserted she directly inspired Summer, as her producers would "play my stuff [specifically her 1973 debut] and tell her to sound a little bit like that."
On "Love To Love You Baby," Summer stepped into a sultry, sensual and glamorous stage persona that she became known for, italicized by airy vocals, suggestive moans and glamorous dresses. Puthli did exactly that on her debut album with her sexy, funkified covers, setting the tone for disco divas.
"My music has always been underground," Puthli continued to The Guardian, noting other similarities in clothing and dance style.
She's The Patron Saint Of South Asian Artists Fusing East & West
When the "Hello Everyone" singer arrived in the U.S., she sought to bring Indian sounds and aesthetics into her music and art. If Westerners could do it, why couldn't she?
"I felt the Beatles, for example, had come to India, taken sitar and popularized it in mainstream [western] music, but I didn’t think it was [one-]way traffic," she told The Guardian last year. "I felt: I’m Indian and I’m influenced by the West. Why can I not be accepted on an equal platform?"
Puthli explicitly referenced two Beatles on her debut album; a cover of John Lennon's "Love" and a deeply sultry rendition of George Harrison's "I Dig Love," which opens with her gargling champagne to great ASMR effect: "I sexed it up," she rightfully noted of the latter song.
But the men at CBS Records didn't get it. They wanted to anglicize her name to something like Ann Powers, but she refused. They clearly didn't trust her as an artist and only wanted her to do covers. Yet Puthli knew what she wanted and what she could do and boldly went for it, again and again. She insisted on including at least one of her own on her debut album — she wrote the jazzy "Truth," the last track of the album.
"CBS did a focus group studying whether I would sell in America, 'You’re not going to sell to the whites, you're not going to sell to Black people.' They said the Indians living in America liked Indian film music," Puthli recounted to the Los Angeles Times. "I don’t feel like a stranger in any country, but the industry made me feel like an outsider. It was a kick in the gut."
Yet through it all, Puthli remained 100 percent herself and found new creative paths to explore. In 1990, she released a vibrant, energetic and eclectically Puthli Hindi pop album entitled Hari Om. On it, she delivers a captivating, frenetic Hindi cover of "Smooth Criminal" entitled "Chipko Chipko," named for the Chipko Andolan environmentalist movement that fought deforestation in the Himalayas — the "original tree huggers!" On "Tere Dil Mein Rehna Hai (Let Me Inside Your Heart)," a love song sung partly in English, Puthli sweetly delivers an apt message to the music industry: "I've been giving it all I got / pulling out all the stops / loving you though you're not / making it easy."
She also used mudra — spiritual Hindu hand poses — in her album art and other portraits, and mixed traditional Indian garments, like silk choli crop tops or shimmery dupatta scarfs, and jewelry with chic high-waisted pants, hot pants or her signature glamorous, flowy frocks.
"She was always the poster child of 'I can't believe all this happened,'" Naya Beat Records co-founder Raghav Mani told the Los Angeles Times last year. "That she wasn't a household name, even in India, it's kind of insane." (L.A. based, South Asian-focused Naya Beat released an excellent Puthli remix album served up by big deal underground DJs like Maurice Fulton, Jitwam and Kraak & Smaak, aptly entitled Disco Mystic in 2024.)
"I don't think Indians really knew what to make of her," said Mani, who is Indian American. "It was unheard of for any South Asian woman to do what she did. At the time, through the lens of the Beatles and [sitar maestro] Ravi Shankar, it looked like Indian musicians were all sitting on top of a rock meditating and playing sitar. It's hard to break through that mold even today, and she did that 50 years ago."
Puthli's art and audacity continue to inspire the next generation of left-field artists, including two young South Asian artists who recently paid tribute to her. She played muse on American alt-R&B songstress Raveena's sultry 2022 sophomore album Asha's Awakening, starring its namesake on "Asha's Kiss," and British experimentalist Nadine Shah's confident, smoky 2024 album Filthy Underneath.
"I hadn't seen South Asian women being presented in that way, with that style of music — it was super sexy," Shah told The Guardian of Puthli's influence. Yet Puthli wasn't trying to push the envelope or play a character: "I was just being myself."
She's Not Done Yet
The '70s was Puthli's most prolific and creatively active decade, even starring in and writing music for film and regularly dazzling on Italian TV. In the early '80s, Puthli released two albums on German and Japanese indie labels but stayed relatively quiet until she released Hari Om in 1990. In 2006, she returned to the stage for NYC's star-studded Summerstage concert series in Central Park.
Mr Bongo reissued The Devil Is Loose in 2021, followed by the career-spanning The Essential Asha Puthli 22-track album in 2022, bringing more of her music to streaming, record stores and back in the public consciousness. This prompted a resurgence of interest in her music, with younger generations hearing her for the first time. In 2024, the incomparable disco diva embarked on her first tour in 40 years, including a momentous Glastonbury 2024 set, her Los Angeles debut at indie club Zebulon and a triumphant return to NYC Summerstage this July.
"I love these small venues, but I want to do the Hollywood Bowl. I want GRAMMYs, keep it coming," Puthli told the Los Angeles Times with a laugh.