"I’m a German of South Asian ancestry who thinks like a Londoner and was raised on Middle Eastern food under a dictatorial government without realizing it. I don’t fit into any predefined category, and neither does my music."
"Attempting to classify the singer-songwriter, keyboard player, composer, and producer T.L. Mazumdar might distract from the essence of his work. He has spent his life growing up in North Africa, the United Kingdom, India, and Germany, with a mind that processes thoughts in four different languages. His musical experiences have been shaped alongside musicians who would never share a stage."
“When you spend your formative years in constantly changing environments, you eventually realize that you will always feel both at home and out of place everywhere. Music became my only constant companion, one that held meaning regardless of the setting.”
Born to a young couple of doctors who were passionate about travel, Mazumdar left India at just seven months old. He spent the following years living between Libya, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and India.
“My parents were first-generation Indian citizens who didn’t realize they were moving to a dictatorship when they took me to Libya. It took them five years to understand this in a pre-internet era before they fled to Europe. Much later, while sitting in a classroom in Calcutta as an adolescent, I felt out of place when everyone laughed at my London accent. That was when I realized I felt ‘at home’ in a foreign country—far more foreign than I had anticipated from my family holidays. A decade later, my German friends nicknamed me ‘Apu’, believing I spoke Indian English, which I learned to fit in with my friends in Calcutta. Now, my British friends say that I’m too ‘German’—apparently, I take everything too seriously.”
A natural nomad based between Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and, more recently, Lisbon, T.L. Mazumdar has been recognized as one of the few Indian musicians striving to break the Western stereotype that artists from India must play sitars, tablas, or sing Bollywood and bhangra songs.
Nominated for the 'Bremer Jazzpreis 2012’ German National Award and the 'Future Sounds Jazz Award 2014’, his career has spanned a highly diverse spectrum over the last decade—from Bangla-Rock groups to international jazz festivals in Asia and Europe. He has performed on national television for 14 million viewers alongside a Grammy Award winner and collaborated with Platinum award-winning producers and musicians from Europe, the UK, and the United States. His achievements include six-figure music composition commissions for film and theatre and inclusion in India’s first official anthology of Indian electronic artists (featuring talents like Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, and Karsh Kale). He has been described as the “only representative of Indian electronic music based in Germany” by IMC Radio in Hamburg. These milestones are just pieces of a journey that continues to expand into a musical universe fuelled by a love for unity in diversity.
“This is my life—connecting worlds: the dreamer and the nerd, the cerebral and the intuitive, the skeptical and the believer, the lost and the found. In most people’s lives, everything revolves around romance and passion. For me, it’s a survival strategy transformed into purpose.”