The Piano Man Founder Arjun Sagar Gupta on Making Jazz Work in India

Right off the bat, one of the first things that restaurateur and musician Arjun Sagar Gupta wants to address about music venue The Piano Man Jazz Club (and the Piano Man in Gurugram) is about payments for artists.

The long-running venue space for indie music in Delhi NCR – the Safdarjung venue, though tiny, was set up in September 2015 and a much bigger Gurugram space was launched in 2019 – has “partially pioneered a flat payment model” according to Gupta. He adds, “It is obvious that any hard-working individual would want to be compensated for their efforts. Over time, it becomes a matter of viability within the ecosystem of venue performances.”

Gupta also tells Rolling Stone India that there’s a third venue he’s opening up in a few months, promising more details soon. In an era where we’ve seen the flourishing and closure of indie music-focused venues such as Blue Frog in Mumbai, The Humming Tree and BFlat (both in Bengaluru), the Piano Man continues to forge on clearly. Perhaps a big part is the artist payments, which Gupta says is based on “creating viability for keeping the venues going.” The artist adds, “We expect that it will rise over time, as we add more venue capacity and as attending live performances becomes more normalized.”

From the likes of jazz legend Chick Corea to prog artist Devin Townsend to all the Bollywood-meets-jazz performers, the Piano Man venues have been a regular stop for international jazz artists as well as Indian indie performers. The goal for Gupta has always been to create a culture where more people go to shows, even if it’s on a Monday night. He’s doing that by hosting upwards of seven concerts each week at each venue, plus stand-up comedy shows. “We have four shows a day at the moment,” Gupta says. Any venue owner in any other part of the country would say it’s an ambitious plan, but he even goes on to say that “only better things” are on the way for the capital’s live music scene.

In our interview, The Piano Man founder and director talks about payments, the pandemic and the changing state of live music in Delhi NCR. Excerpts:

What has it been like seeing New Delhi’s live music landscape change over the last seven years since you launched Piano Man Jazz Club?

I can go a little further and give a 20-year perspective. I first started performing on the Delhi music scene in 2002, exactly 20 years ago, after I finished with my high school.

I don’t recall being paid a penny for most of my shows, even the ones where I was assured a payment, I don’t recall there being more than a handful of musicians playing blues and jazz and I don’t recall a single venue with great gear built into it.

Besides that, the live music scene subculture was and is fun. I still thoroughly enjoyed performing, and attending performances.

Over the last seven years, the general awareness of live performances has grown immensely. The jazz community is several dozen strong and growing fast, many ethical players on the scene ensure timely payments and more and more venues are investing in great infrastructure.

Has there been improvement? Yes, exponential. From just about every perspective of the music scene, other than the fact that streaming platforms have replaced labels to quite an extent. Though that bodes well for discoverability, it is very hard to earn a living from streaming revenues unless one is extremely popular.

Our Sunday jam sessions have been a place where I work with young artists and try to build the jazz scene. But besides that, I think the music scene in Delhi is significantly beyond anywhere it has ever been, and there are only better things on the horizon.

With venues, you’re always venturing into wholly new territory, right? So even though Delhi has had long-running venues before, the conditions for operating do change over the years. What kind of challenges have the Delhi and Gurugram outlets had that way? 

I don’t think there are or have been many spaces in the country that are truly music venues. We aren’t a restaurant that serves music, we’re a music space that serves food. Just looking through the other side of the glass changes a lot about the intent of an organization and affects the way processes are detailed.

Our intent remains the same from the day that we began. We are a space for the presentation and exposure of largely non-commercial western music, focussed on jazz and its related art forms, for the Indian audience. This statement drives our intent and our processes.

Covid was a curveball. It’s pointless crying about how much we suffered, because a lot of people had a much worse year than us. We are fortunate, we worked hard to survive and we’re working hard to build a more stable organization for the next black swan. The one thing we did take away from Covid was to be a lot more cognizant of our system leakages, to build a more robust and viable business.

Jazz in India undoubtedly has to credit Piano Man for keeping things going, creating a regular stop for Indian and international artists in the capital. Has that been part of the larger picture in terms of legacy and goals for you?  

I’ve always maintained that the two most important things for the emergence of a subculture in any geographical boundary is the supply of education and exposure. As a venue, we have our role to play to create exposure for audiences, because if you have never experienced something, how can you ever decide whether you like it? Exposure allows people to make subjective decisions about the matter at hand, which over time leads to building a patronage for an art form.

One of the things all artists wish for is that they get better payment from venues. So what has it been like for the Piano Man to navigate this?

Our intent remains to push the scene forward till a point where more and more people are willing to spend on music for the sake of music, once the average spend increases, there are more resources in the ecosystem for everyone.

I also believe there are three essential factors in putting together a concert – the artist, The venue (organizer) and the promoter. Each element has their responsibility clearly demarcated.

It is the promoters’ responsibility to ensure attendance at the event. We have spent years and countless resources building this reputation, to ensure that guests and patrons come to watch the wonderful musicians that take our stage.

One of the very big issues in the Indian music venue ecosystem is the payment of fees to artists. We have hosted nearly 7,000 shows at our clubs, and we are meticulous and particular about payments. We usually have a 2–4 week processing time to ensure all payments are cleared on receiving invoices. Many payments are made earlier than this period as well.

A few international artists have come in after the pandemic has eased. So what’s in the pipeline for 2023 at Piano Man?

It is such a boon to have travel norms easing up. We’ve had the pleasure to host artists from Germany, Spain, Argentina, Chile, France, Japan and more countries in recent months.

2023 already has some fun tours. We have artists visiting from the US, Japan, Argentina, and closer home, from other parts of India.

Most excitedly, we have our new venue opening in a few months, and we’re currently working on engineering a whole new approach to programming for this venue. We truly believe it will help evolve the small venue scene in the country, details coming soon!

Kolkata recently launched Skinny Mo’s, and Bengaluru has the Blue Room, but there are few spaces platforming just jazz. Is it risky to work in this niche within a niche? Or do you feel Piano Man has eventually found a balance to cater to all kinds of audiences?

Our own programming methodology eventually told us that it is impossible to program 45 to 60 unique pure jazz performances at a time, simply as so many unique jazz bands don’t exist on the scene at the moment. We’ve also always been open to blues, rock, R&B, soul, pop, western classical music etc.

I think it’s essential to have many, many more music venues across India. We have enough people in the country, it’s a matter of building attendance of live music concerts into people’s day-to-day lives. To normalize attending a show as something to do on a Monday night to start the week on a good note. Music has the ability, like other forms of expressive arts, to affect one’s emotional and mental state, and it can bring unbounded joy. Our job is for more and more people to experience that.

As time progresses, we keep trying to learn and evolve, at the same time, as I mentioned before, to keep focus on our intent. In the long run, the only thing that will really create impact is [when] we are able, together with the artist community, to build a growing patronage for live performance arts.

Check out upcoming events at The Piano Man Jazz Club in New Delhi and The Piano Man in Gurugram here.