Dhaval Kothari Swears By His Gujarati Roots on ‘Tu Pan Ke’

The singer-composer and entrepreneur talks about how he manages his music alongside his music company All By Play

Indore-raised singer-composer Dhaval Kothari. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Indore singer-composer Dhaval Kothari says his music has spread fastest through an unlikely source – messaging app WhatsApp. The Gujarati artist says the tracks which have over 100,000 streams on YouTube have mostly come from WhatsApp shares. “It’s all because of the [Gujarati] diaspora in Canada, U.S. and U.K. […] That was something shocking for me,” he says.

With time, Kothari – who studied music business at Berklee College of Music and went on to work with Spotify in India before launching his own music agency All By Play – has begun to understand the value of keeping his Gujarati roots strong as a musician. “I realized something that is attached to my heart and soul and my sound is my roots,” the Indore-based, Gujarati-origin artist says.

That comes to the front with his new Gujarati song “Tu Pan Ke,” with vocalist Krishani Gadhvi and producer Vishal Khatri. Singing about lost friendship and the power of music, Kothari and Khatri work in subtle but soulful elements ranging from sitar to saxophone, walking the line between dexterity arrangement and pop melodies.

Classically trained in vocals from the Mewati Gharana as well as adept in music production, Kothari started his YouTube channel in 2015 and has been growing his audience ever since. At the core of it is finding Gujarati folk songs – most of them taught to him by his grandmother, who is now 90 years old – and putting them through modern production and songwriting, like “Kon Halave Limbdi” to “Kaho Poonam Na” and more. “For each and every event, we have a song,” Kothari says about the folk tradition that he’s carrying forward in his own with his song series Folktales. It’s no surprise then that nostalgia is a big part of Kothari’s songs, which in turn brings in the diaspora listeners from countries like Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

Just as he steadily built his repertoire with Folktales, Kothari also opened himself up to music across languages and styles during his stint with Spotify. It led to him starting All By Play in January 2023. With about employees now with him, All By Play works with artists like Pulkit Jain, Prateeksha Srivastava and Semwal, among others. “It is difficult to balance everything, but then I try it out and be I have one more song ready, which I’ll be releasing next month,” he says.

Occasionally, the amount of music in imbibe also means that it leads Kothari to “get confused” about his own sound, but he means it in a good way. “There’s so much inspiration and sound is evolving every single day. But then I think that my roots and my music that I’ve been brought up with should be there in my overall sound as well,” Kothari adds.

Watch the video for “Tu Pan Ke” below.

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