The Very Best Asian Flavas album out on 4th April 2005 on Outcaste Records

British Asians had been involved in the pop industry since its infancy – be they flamboyant frontmen like Cliff Richard, Engelbert Humperdinck, Peter Sarstedt, Freddie Mercury and Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman, or backroom boys like the disco producer Biddu. But few of them made any reference to their Asian ancestry. It was something rarely mentioned, something to be faintly embarrassed about, something that PR people would not mention.

Slowly, things changed. By the late 1970s, a generation of musicians from Southall and the Midlands were pioneering bhangra, a mix of Punjabi folk rhythms and Western dance music. And, by the early ’90s, a third wave of confident, politicised British Asian musicians emerged. These were drawing from years of influences – fusing Hindustani classical music, Indian folk rhythms and Bollywood soundtracks with punk, funk, metal, jazz and hip hop – while also relentlessly mapping out a new musical future.

In London, this music coalesced around Outcaste, an adventurous club night launched by a young entrepreneur called Shabs in 1995. Outcaste started running themed nights at Ormond’s in Piccadilly, central London, where DJs played a thrilling mix of Indo-jazz fusion, funky Bollywood tracks, and new mixes that spliced a cappella Hindi vocals with
cutting-edge techno and hip hop beats.

That year, Outcaste released its first album ‘Migration’ by a young multi-instrumentalist called Nitin Sawhney. A fusion of cutting-edge dance music, Indian classical music, jazz, funk and flamenco, Sawhney became a major international star, setting the tone for a record label that would continue to push at boundaries and redefine the musical world it occupied.

The label has also put together a series of pioneering compilations of Hindi film anthems, Bollywood funk, Indo jazz fusion, Indian classical music and cutting-edge breakbeat acts. It has even branched out into flamenco, Brazilian music and Jewish klezmer with the London band Oi Va Voi.

This compilation is a broad overview of some of the major talents who emerged from the Outcaste stable, including Nitin Sawhney and the Bombay tabla and bass duo Badmarsh & Shri. It also includes several great floor-filling club anthems – the sitar-led funk of ‘Mathar’ by the legendary jazz vibist Dave Pike, the Knight Rider-sampling hip hop of Panjabi MC’s ‘Mundian Tu Bach Ke’, the Top Ten hit ‘Dance With You’ by the Rishi Rich Project featuring Southall’s R&B king Jay Sean. And there are plenty of lesser-known classics, be they the cut-and-paste sampladelic funk of Sutrasonic and the Bollywood Breaks Orchestra, or the ambient epics of Niraj Chag or Ges E.

In its ten years, Outcaste has proved itself much more than just a boutique label peddling Indian exotica for dinner parties. Outcaste artists have constantly pioneered new sonic textures, making music that was both cerebral and dancefloor-oriented, music that reimagined the world, melding continents, playing games with chronology, plundering from ancient and modern with glee.
John Lewis, Time Out Magazine, London 2005