SUSHEELA RAMAN: Blending classical Carnatic with jazz, blues and pop by Sam Mills Susheela Raman is a trained and highly skilled vocalist who has fused jazz, rock, black music and blues to her own Indian classical Carnatic repertoire. When people say ‘fusion’ they are often talking about a very elite jazz-meets-classical encounter, but ‘fusion’ is not a fixed thing, because all music styles are continuously evolving and always contested. There are musicians born in India reaching out, non-Indian musicians coming in and bicultural musicians like Susheela Raman who do both at the same time.