mohini dey

The bass maverick and composer on the common ground between fashion and music, plus the move to Nashville

- Anurag Tagat

MOHINI DEY has steadily become one of the most recognized Indian bass players globally and it ’s something she’s worked on right from when she was a nine-year-old. When she was pretty much trained by her father – the late Sujoy Dey– in bass, acclaim and recognition came in her adolescence and teenage years itself. Dey had played for everyone from Zakir Hussain to Ranjit Barot (a formative mentor) and A.R. Rahman.

Even now at 27, what could be considered a lifetime’s worth of achievements are in Dey’s resumé – she’s performed with guitar greats like Steve Vai and Guthrie Govan, (finally) released her solo self-titled album and is now shuttling between Nashville and Mumbai with saxophonist (and husband) Mark Hartsuch as she puts down new roots in the U.S.

As a young artist who started out when she was even younger, what continued to draw you to music even as your other interests grew, like fashion designing?

I think the aspect and creation, the whole process of creating and ideating something is what drew me to music over time. Music was not my first choice, fashion designing was. I think I found a similarity between fashion designing and music, because both have the creation tie up and this designing aspect that links them.

I think that’s why I ended up really enjoying music because I love the process of making music, I love getting together with people and writing music, coming up with different sounds and fusing that with other things. It’s the same thing with fashion – I will take different fabrics from like saris and embroidery and I’ll just patch them up together. There’s some interesting fusion that happens.