No one could blame the Indian singer Asha Puthli for a little name-dropping. The collaborators and benefactors in her career since the late 1960's include, just for starters, Ornette Coleman, Martha Graham, the Notorious B.I.G., the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and the talent scout John Hammond. She has scandalized India and delighted British talk-show audiences; she has been a catalyst in German disco and an Italian B-movie actress.

With a four-octave range and a lifelong ambition to synthesize East and West, Ms. Puthli has sung jazz, disco, rock and Indian music. She is to perform her first New York City concert in 25 years tomorrow at Central Park SummerStage - joined by the jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman and the rapper Guru - followed by a Joe's Pub date on Sept. 13.

"I feel like a global person,she said in an interview at a friend's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "My psyche, I think, is very American. My soul and my roots are very Indian. And my career has been more European.”

Since her first exposure to jazz as a young girl, Ms. Puthli said, she had wanted to fuse the 6,000-year-old culture of India with American music. Asked her age, she said, "I'm spiritually 6,000, I'm mentally 98, I'm emotionally 5 and chronologically in between.

Cross-cultural encounters were always part of her life. Born in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, to a well-do-to family, she was educated at a Roman Catholic school and practiced Hinduism at home; she studied classical Indian music and dance, along with European music. She trained to be an opera singer until, she said, she found that it meant giving up other styles to preserve her voice.

"I'm like a wild horse,she said. "I decided, I have to give up opera if it's going to put any kind of restraint on me.

Ms. Puthli heard jazz on Voice of America radio broadcasts, and started to sing it in Mumbai nightclubs - arriving as a customer where musician friends were playing, and stepping onstage with her back to the audience, lest her parents find out. One performance impressed Ved Mehta, a writer for The New Yorker, whose article about a young singer who was determined to go abroad for real jazz - "a beautiful, mercurial girl,he wrote - appeared in the magazine and in Mr. Mehta's 1970 book, "Portrait of India.”

Her professional career started, she said, with a calculated laugh. Mr. Merchant and Mr. Ivory were filming their 1969 movie, "The Guru,” in Mumbai at a house where one of Ms. Puthli's girlfriends lived.

"I was absolutely dying to be discovered,she said. "They were filming in the big hall, and I was talking in another room with my girlfriend. When you sing opera, your voice changes, and your laughter changes - I used to laugh like waterfalls. Although I had heard them say, ‘Silence on the set!,' I gave my operatic laugh. It worked! The door flings open, and there is Mr. Merchant, saying, ‘Who was laughing?' I did the apologetic thing, although I had done it deliberately, but Mr. Merchant said: ‘No, no, no, we want you. Get into a sari and come into the scene.' But all they wanted was my laugh.

She began to perform more seriously as a singer, including an appearance at the Bombay Arts Festival, where she improvised in both jazz and Indian styles in the same song.

"It was only fusion in the sense that it was coming from one mouth,” she said. Ms. Puthli wangled a dance scholarship with Martha Graham and looked up Mr. Mehta when she got to New York City; he directed her to Mr. Hammond, who had read the article. And Mr. Hammond soon sent her to a recording session for the Ornette Coleman album "Science Fiction.

Other singers had had trouble with Mr. Coleman's tricky melodies, but Ms. Puthli learned them on the spot. For her two songs on the album, she shared the award for best female jazz vocalist in Downbeat magazine's annual jazz critics' poll.

But Ms. Puthli didn't want to stay within jazz. She worked with a psychedelic blues band whose recordings went unreleased after Ms. Puthli held out for more money than Columbia Records was willing to pay her. She appeared, scantily clad, in the 1972 Merchant-Ivory film "Savages,which was banned in India.

"I was known as a maverick,she said. "It was breaking tradition to be in show business, to show my body onstage, to be half-naked in a movie.”

Ms. Puthli had wanted a career in the United States, home of the jazz and soul she loved. "When Americans talk about fusion, they talk about the American artists who have gone and brought in Indian elements,she said. "I'm proud of my Indian heritage and I want to build the bridge and let them understand that someone has come here who can sing on a level playing field - even though it wasn't a level playing field - without compromise. ‘Hey, guys, I'm talented, so what if I come from another part of the world?' But it was a one-way traffic, and when I was coming this way, the doors were closed.

Instead, she got her chance in Europe. After a cheeky appearance on a British talk show, Ms. Puthli was signed to a recording contract with CBS Records in England. On her debut album she aimed for the pop mainstream, working with Elton John's producer, Del Newman. Amid its hodgepodge of styles, the album, "Asha Puthli,included "Right on Time,with a midtempo wah-wah groove and whispery vocals that might have been a template for Donna Summer's hits a few years later.

It also had a version of George Harrison's "I Dig Love,a wild, post-psychedelic artifact, complete with sound effects, soul horns and Ms. Puthli alternately breathy and giggling.

"The way the Beatles saw it was as a spiritual song,she said. "They did it like a bhajan, an Indian religious song. In 1973, when I did it, I felt I was already Indian, and the spirituality was inside me. I was trying to become Western, so I brought out the material aspect, the sexual aspect.

Ms. Puthli's third album, "The Devil Is Loose,perfected her disco sound. Made in Germany, with Ms. Puthli collaborating on most of the songwriting, it had airy vocals riding lean but plush grooves. One of its songs, "Space Talk,would be sampled for the Notorious B.I.G.'s song "The World Is Filled ...in 1997 (although the B.I.G. album credits it incorrectly as Kit Walker's "Spacewalk”).

Ms. Puthli recorded soundtrack songs for an Italian B movie, "Squadra Antigangsters(also known as "The Gang That Sold America”), then stepped into the lead role when Ursula Andress dropped out. In the early 1980's she tried rock, reaching the charts in Japan and singing, on her 1982 album "Only the Headaches Remain,about a nuclear meltdown and about the wave of anti-Asian violence in England.

For a decade she nearly dropped out of music to raise her son, Jannu. He was the one who told her, in the late 1990's, that a friend who was a New York disc jockey had just bought one of her old albums - now a collectors' item - for $100. The disc jockey, Sean Dinsmore, was behind the Dum Dum Project, an Indian-electronica hybrid, and at her son's urging Ms. Puthli sang, "Hey Dawani, Hey Dawanafor him. "Then I found out about the sampling,she said. Her old tracks have been revived by Jay-Z, the Neptunes, Governor and others.

Suddenly Ms. Puthli was in demand in the United States - but as an Indian-style vocalist. She sang mantras for the bassist and producer Bill Laswell, and improvised in a high, Bollywood-style voice for the English group Stratus. But she has recorded an album of jazz tunes, and at Central Park her set may well include songs from Lionel Hampton and Nirvana, along with her own music.

"I'm a free spirit,she said. "My mind always operates on the in-betweens, like the microtones in music. I'm an artist, and it's difficult for artists to draw lines. We draw circles - concentric and eccentric circles.”

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