Falu Goes From Grammys To Tour With Jazz-Folk Ensemble American Patchwork Quartet

Winning a Grammy Award can often provide an artist with new opportunities that come with the heightened exposure. For Falguni Shah, an 11th-generation Hindustani classical vocalist known professionally as Falu, that opportunity came in the form of a tweet from India Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Falu and her husband, Indian-American neuroscientist and musician Gaurav Shah, won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Children’s Album for A Colorful World, three years after being nominated in the same category for Falu’s Bazaar.

“I was born and raised in India and so my Prime Minister was very proud. He tweeted about me and invited me to meet him in Delhi, India,” Falu tells Pollstar. “We met and he wanted to use the power of music to help end world hunger.”

What resulted is “Abundance In Millets” – a song and video promoting millet, a gluten-free cereal grain that grows rapidly in warm climates and poor soils – and the Shahs’ third Grammy nomination, this time in the Best Global Music Performance category.

In the meantime, Falu joined American Patchwork Quartet, a genre-fluid, folk- and jazz-influenced band founded by led by multi-Grammy Award-winning guitarist/vocalist Clay Ross, along with Yasushi Nakamura, an internationally acclaimed Issei jazz bassist, and Clarence Penn, a drumer protégée of Ellis Marsalis who is rooted in African American church traditions.

Once the Grammy Awards are handed out Feb. 4 in Los Angeles, Falu returns to promoting APQ’s eponymous debut album to be released Feb. 9. They’ve been on the road touring in advance of the release since October.

She may have come to the United States in 2000 to be with her husband, but Falu sought out opportunities for herself. She has performed with Boston-based Indo-American band Karyshma, Asian Massive leader Karsh Kale, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad project, served a two-year Indian music visiting lectureship at Tufts University in Boston, served as one of Carnegie Hall’s Music Ambassadors to New York City and performed at the White House for presidents Obama and Biden.

It was during her time at Carnegie Hall that she met Ross and in 2020 joined APQ and its extraordinary amalgam of world and folk music forms.

“I was fortunate to collaborate, play and teach at Carnegie Hall. Clay was one of our teaching artists that I taught and performed with. We’ve been friends and colleagues for at least five or six years now,” Falu says. “I came here, but I also studied songwriting and composition in Boston. I took some classes at Berklee and wanted to learn how I could draw really from both cultures, Indian and American, and make a sound which we call in the Hindi ‘clay pot’ that was very close to the folk songs that [Ross] grew up with.”

She admits her only exposure to American folk music until that time was through artists like Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris. Ross taught her to sing American folk standards like “Shenendoah,” “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Wind and Rain.”

“Clay had this idea that if I can do melodies from the mountains of India, why can’t I do songs from the Appalachian Mountains? And these are beautiful melodies that I can relate to. It’s not that alien to me.”

All four members of the Quartet are accomplished musicians in their own rights. Ross says that despite the diversity and dynamics of the musical collective, the concept is very simple.

“It really is just a simple idea, that took a lot of fine tuning and a lot of trial and error and a lot of wayfinding, as they say,” Ross tells Pollstar. “That was really done a lot by Falu, and through the opportunity that we had to collaborate as teaching artists. It helped us to build the friendship and trust that it takes to embark on this kind of adventure together.

“Folk music is very organic, and it succeeds when people put themselves into it. It’s not written music that just any musician can come and sit and play. It’s the kind of music that calls for personal interpretations and personal thought and consideration, and we’ve worked together very closely to try to create a statement that all four of us can feel good about making together.”