“Her transcendent voice raised the roof at Wells Cathedral!” Nick Nugent BBC.

“Fearless artist of the highest calibre…” Mira Misra Kaushik OBE.

“Her vibrant personality is unmatched…” James Davy, Organist and Master of Choristers at Chelmsford Cathedral.

Shephali combines historic Asian folk from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan with Indian classical music, modern British jazz & poetry to give a powerful, new voice to contemporary world music. Journeying from slow, contemplative compositions to rhythmic numbers, her audiences travel between meditative repose & impromptu dance. When English spoken-word and lyrics weave in with her repertoire in Sanskrit, Urdu, Saraiki, Farsi, Pashto, Hindi & Arabic, a joined-up world truly takes shape.

Her passion for this global connectedness comes from a childhood spent in the small towns of India, where the calls of a wider, distant world drove her to cavernous local libraries. As she turned the browned pages of rare books containing ancient histories, she heard music with a deep resonance. When life brought her to live in the UK, she wove her longing for home into songs from 5th Century BCE to mid 21st Century. She is known internationally as a performer of Urdu ghazal & nazms.

Her musical journey took a turn when the pandemic struck. In the still, two years spent under the flightless skies of Essex, she faced a major contradiction – why hadn’t she  allowed her life in the UK to intersect with the music that she created? What were her reasons behind this denial? These questions fed into her creative process, and at the end of lockdown, ‘Shephali Frost Ensemble’ was born.

She spent hours listening, talking & experimenting with leading British instrumentalists. New influences crept into her music, leading to a unique, new body of work which she lovingly calls, ‘The Inheritance of Love.’

Her collaborators are a formidable set of classical & jazz musicians with a love of improvisation and pushing boundaries: Martin Hathaway, Chris Caldwell and Zak Barratt on Saxophone; Susie Hodder-Williams on Flute; Dan Banks on Piano; Shanti Jayasinha on Cello; Robin Christian on Indian Flute; Trevor Taylor on Drums and Percussion; Jonathan Mayer on Sitar; Mark Hewins on Electric Guitar; avant garde violinist Phil Wachsmann; Aslam Ali on Tabla; Dave Lee on Synth & Piano.

The ensemble have toured nationally to diverse venues: Wells Cathedral (Somerset), Albany Theatre (Coventry), Music on the Edge (Devon), Bell Square (Hounslow), Old Church (Stoke Newington), Jazz 825 (Southend) and many more. Shephali created a new concert called ‘Earth Songs’ in collaboration with the Chelmsford Cathedral choir for artist Luke Jerram’s Gaia installation, where a spellbound audience listened to the fusion of Latin choral music and Shephali’s go-to genre. Commissioned by the Chelmsford Museum, she created an utterly unique soundscape to mark the 100th anniversary of the BBC’s foundation in Essex.

A new album of Shephali’s poetry in English called, ‘Turmoil of Onions’ is set to be released in Summer 2024.

As a wayward, hyperactive child in an Indian society, entrenched in middle-class morality, fractured early relationships transmuted into her screenplay, ‘The O Shaped Mouth.’ Set in UK and India, this story about a daughter trying to resolve her relationship with her dead mother won the NYLA Best Screenplay Award in New York (2012), Best Script at the Women’s International Film Festival in New York (2013) and the honour of a quarter finalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowship run by the Oscars (2011).

Shephali’s creative intensity & restlessness has driven her across many genres & disciplines. While doing her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, a part-time job as a nursing care assistant inspired her set of short stories about elderly dementia called ‘No Such Thing as Sanity.’ Shephali has written two books of poetry in her mother tongue Hindi, called, ‘Abhi maine Dekha’ (Witness) & ‘Amroodon Wali Dopahar’ (Afternoon of Guavas) to high critical acclaim. Her poetry has featured in several Hindi language magazines in India, and in English translation by the Mulosige Project of the British Museum & SOAS, University of London.

Her interest in migration issues led to her debut short film, ‘Mr. & Mrs. Gill Come to Britain,’ made for a Postgraduate degree in Documentary Production at the University of Wales in Cardiff. It won an RTS Award for Best Student Documentary (1999) in Wales and was distributed across Europe by the British Council. Shephali continues to work as a film & video editor in the London broadcast industry where she has edited news & documentaries for BBC, Channel 4 & Amnesty International.

Her volunteer work with new Afghan refugees in Essex & the organisation ‘Freedom from Torture’ based in London, led her to curating a project called ‘Hello World Refugee Music’ with the support of Essex County Council. She collaborated with musicians from the Syrian refugee diaspora. She also created a special song & poetry based concert in support of International Red Cross at the Pimlott Foundation (Colchester).

Her love of people and their stories comes from her solo travels through remote villages in Northern India, staying in a room where the ceiling still carried water marks from recent floods; through Kashmir, being invited to the homes of some of the friendliest strangers in this world; driving with the most basic road-map in West Bengal, visiting the homes of migrant labourers who she had befriended. It is true that only after discovering protest poetry on the streets of New Delhi, fighting for harmony and minority rights, Shephali found her reasons to perform her music on the world stage.

Shephali’s music can be heard & seen on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music & Apple Music.

Get in touch with any questions or booking enquiries