INFORMATION
Clinton Cerejo is an Indian music producer and singer. His range of work includes playback singing, vocal arrangements, musical arrangements, background scores, music programming, production. His unique style and musical enthusiasm has attracted various collaborations with many leading Indian composers.
Career
During his time at college, he would often have jam sessions with his friend Siddharth Haldipur (of music director duo Sangeet-Siddharth fame). It was on one such session that Amar Haldipur (Siddharth’s father), who is a famous arranger and violinist, noticed Clinton and took a liking to his voice. Amar introduced Clinton to Anand Modak, the music director of a Marathi film Mukta and soon he was performing his first song in a recording studio. It was an English song for a Marathi film, picturised on an African-American.
After a series of sporadic recordings, he started lending his voice to many advertisement jingles. During this period he worked with Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Lezz Lewis, Ranjit Barot & Louis Banks. Some of his contemporaries at that time were KK and Kunal Ganjawala, who went on to become playback singers. Clinton and Kunal sang a lot of jingles together.
Realizing that his voice was not versatile enough to be a successful jingle singer, he started looking at other areas of interest.
Since his college days, Clinton always took a keen interest in the texture of a song and all the elements that went into producing it. This pulled him towards production/arranging. Not being too picky about the production assignments, he started off with small films and remix albums. By word of mouth, one thing led to another and his work was recognised.
A. R. Rahman, while working in an adjoining studio, happened to overhear one of Clinton’s vocal arrangements for a song and when they met a month later, offered Clinton the opportunity to work with him. Soon his work was noticed by many and other projects followed.
Eventually Clinton went on to work with many leading Indian music composers performing various roles in the music department. Later on he composed various songs which were featured in Coke studio. One of the famous songs is “Madari”, sung by Vishal Dadlani and Sonu Kakkar.
