Coke Studio Roots @The Peninsula Studios
Real People, Real Music, The Real Thing
MUSIC
Since 2009, The Peninsula Studios has gone looking for musicians in small towns the recording industry never visits. We have recorded nearly 2,000 of them, carrying out more than 1,000 field recordings across the Indian subcontinent. Eighty came to Delhi for our Artist in Residence program.
What follows is the archive itself — six collections, each built around a different musical tradition.
Sixty of the musicians recorded across the archive have gone on to national television, film, and performance careers across eighty countries — among them Kutle Khan of Mast Qalandars and Vishaljit Kaur of the Rangley Punjabis, now studying music on scholarship in Canada. We record musicians before recognition changes their careers; their later success is part of the record too.
Institutions wishing to license, exhibit, or add to this archive are welcome to write to us.
We were there first.
Discovering the Peninsula
This is where the archive begins. Long before Coke Studio Roots, Mast Qalandars, or any other collection existed, there was this: field recordings made in villages and small towns across the subcontinent, of folk musicians the recording industry has never visited. Every other collection on this page grew out of this search.
Behind each song lies a story — a monument, a poet, a meal, a history. A Nawab in Punjab built tombs for his court musicians in Nakodar; his musicians' descendants are among those we have recorded. Saints and poets featured in this collection include Bulleh Shah, Baba Farid, and Shah Hussain of Punjab, Lalon Fakir of Kushtia in Bangladesh, Vallabhacharya of Guntur, Narsinh Mehta of Gujarat, and Jayadeva of Orissa.
#MusicChangesLives | #DiscoverThePeninsula
Rangley Punjabis @The Peninsula Studios - Punjab
Mast Qalandars @The Peninsula Studios - Rajasthan
Coke Studio Roots
In 2015, The Peninsula Studios created Coke Studio Roots, a branded music property for the Coca-Cola Company. Over nine months, we traveled 1,800 kilometers through Punjab, carried out more than 100 field recordings, and produced 10 music videos and documentaries featuring 24 artists from Malerkotla, Nakodar, Bhatinda, and Patiala.
#MusicChangesLives | #DiscoverThePeninsula
Mast Qalandars
Beginning in 2010, The Peninsula Studios recorded more than 700 undiscovered musicians across Rajasthan. Twenty-eight were selected for the Artist in Residence program, and ten tracks were mixed and mastered in London in 2011. The resulting album, Mast Qalandars, won the National Award for Best Album.
The recordings also gave rise to Mast Qalandars, The Peninsula Studios' performing ensemble, through which artists including Kutle Khan, Dayam Khan, and Nathoo Lal Solanki continue to perform for audiences in India and internationally. The ensemble has appeared at Nokia Music Connect in Dubai, where Imogen Heap gave the group a standing ovation, as well as for the Market Research Society of India, the Bengal Club, and the Friends Club, New Delhi.
Maestros In Studio
Classical Music
The Rangley Punjabis
The Peninsula Studios built this collection for Nokia Music Theatre, broadcast on MTV, tracing Punjabi music back to its folk roots. It features Dolly Guleria, daughter of Surinder Kaur; Afshana Khan, found through this same small-town search in Bhatinda; and Balwinder Singh Mast of Naushera, on the border, singing Challa.
Vishaljit Kaur, also featured in this collection, went on to a scholarship to study music in Canada. Twenty artists are featured; the album was nominated for Best Album – Folk at the GIMA 2015 awards.
Military Music
The Martial Music Archives
The archive also preserves musical traditions maintained by institutions rather than communities. The Maratha Light Infantry, one of India's oldest regiments at 250 years, gave The Peninsula Studios the honor of recording its Silver Band, formed at the regimental center in Belgaum. The 32-piece band recorded 28 martial pieces to mark the regiment's 250th anniversary.
Maestros In Studio
Some recordings become the historical record of an artist's craft. Maestros in Studio exists to create those records at the beginning of a musician's career, in the tradition of the early recordings of M. S. Subbulakshmi, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Sharma, and Dr. Balamuralikrishna.
The program's first season, in 2018, recorded artists including Jayanthi Kumaresh, Sikkil Gurucharan, Omkar Dadarkar, Bharat Sundar, and Soumik Datta.
