Mohini Dey

A Fender Jazz Bass before she could read music

Dey was born on 20 July 1996 to a Bengali musical family and raised in Mumbai. Her mother, Romia Dey, is a classical singer; her father, Sujoy Dey, was a studio bassist on the city's session circuit. He spotted something in her before she turned three and sat her down with his own Fender Jazz Bass — which is why the standard account of her start is a first lesson at three rather than a teenage conversion.

She was onstage in public by ten and working for money not long after; by her own count in 2023, aged 27, she had eighteen years of professional work behind her. Her teachers were not conservatory staff but working Mumbai players: drummer Ranjit Barot and keyboardist Louis Banks, both fixtures of the Indian fusion scene, took her on while she was still a child. The grounding shows up in what she plays now — Carnatic rhythmic cycles sitting under funk, rather than bolted on as decoration.

The session decade

At 18, in 2014, she appeared at Berklee with A.R. Rahman, the composer whose orbit gave her the widest Indian audience. Zakir Hussain followed. From roughly 2019 the work went international and stayed there: Steve Vai, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater, Alex Lifeson, the Japanese rock duo B'z, the Indonesian guitarist Dewa Budjana, John Frusciante. The pattern is consistent — instrumentalists with difficult material hire her because she can hold a groove through metric changes most bassists have to count out loud.

Alongside the sessions she has a band of her own standing: MaMoGi, a trio with saxophonist Mark Hartsuch and drummer Gino Banks, the son of her early mentor. She and Banks have known each other since she was twelve. The trio has played Billboard Live rooms in Tokyo and Osaka. She married Hartsuch in 2021 and the two announced their divorce in November 2024, which has not stopped him appearing on her records.

Her self-titled debut arrived on 18 August 2023, nine tracks assembled remotely with Simon Phillips, Narada Michael Walden, Guthrie Govan, Marco Minnemann, Scott Kinsey, Ron Bumblefoot Thal, Gergő Borlai, Gino Banks and Rhythm Shaw among others. Her father died that same year. She described the record then as a ledger: her successes, her failures and her personal explorations baked into the nine tracks.

The Dey Way

The second album, The Dey Way, came out on 20 July 2026 — her thirtieth birthday — self-released, eight tracks, thirty-seven minutes and forty-three seconds. The structure is unusually literal: one featured drummer or singer per track, each cut built around them. Borlai takes the title track, WILLOW sings on Xtroverted Soul, Marco Cirigliano plays Whammy Award, Eric Moore takes Slappa Dey Bass, Larnell Lewis plays Joy, Roni Kaspi takes 15 Steps Ahead, and Dennis Chambers gets the tribute, Uncle Dennis. Bumblefoot, Jack Gardiner, saxophonist Jonathan Mones and keyboardist Dániel Szebényi fill out the sessions.

Nobody was in a room together. Dey has been candid that the guests recorded separately because the diaries never aligned, which is the condition of her working life rather than an artistic choice. The record closes with DAD, a minute and ten seconds for her father, and she has said the writing came out of both pain and joy — a progression that, in her words, shows more of who she is becoming and what she might still do.

She has also been plain about not pre-deciding what the music is. Asked about the album's refusal to settle into one genre, she said she dislikes putting rules around herself before writing, because then she starts thinking about what something is supposed to be instead of letting it become what it wants to be.

A record that divided the reviewers

The reviews landed at the end of August 2026 and did not agree. One gave it 8/10, noting that Dey wastes no time, running up and down the fretboard with graceful alacrity, that the unexpected subdivisions and polyrhythms never come apart, and that the whole thing is dripping with love for music and the absolute joy of playing it. Its picks were the title track, Whammy Award and Joy.

Another found the same album incredibly boring and difficult to enjoy, and reached for the sharpest image of the year: the songs feel like an overexcited child who will not pick one or two toppings for their ice cream and instead tries to put them all on at once. That reviewer conceded the technical case entirely while arguing she shows no appetite for writing something simple and catchy, and singled out Xtroverted Soul as the near-miss and DAD as relief.

Both sides are arguing about density rather than ability, which is roughly the argument Dey has invited for years. Her own stated position is that vocabulary matters more than chops, and that gimmicks and cool tricks are fun but not enough.

Where she stands now

Since 2024 Dey has played bass in WILLOW's band, which is how the singer ended up on The Dey Way. That crossover brought a pop audience and, in late 2025, the first real reputational trouble of her career: she took a marketing partnership with the generative AI music service Suno and was widely criticised by other working musicians for it. The row was still being relitigated in coverage of the new album nearly a year later.

The 2026 touring year was the busiest of her life and almost entirely overseas. Slaktkyrkan in Stockholm on 13 May, Ronnie Scott's in Soho the following night, Bad Astronaut in Houston on 18 June, Le Studio TD at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal on 25 June, the Harbor Stage at Newport Jazz Festival on 31 July, Keystone Korner Baltimore on 4 August, and two sets at Alvas Showroom in San Pedro on 26 September.

Ten dates are currently on sale, all of them in the two Blue Note rooms: Los Angeles on 5 and 6 November 2026, two shows a night, then New York on 9, 10 and 11 February 2027, again double sets. Her rig is unglamorous and consistent — Mayones basses, an Aguilar pickup and OBP-3 preamp in the main instrument, SIT Rock Brites strung.045 to.125, and a Markbass Little Mark 800 through 4x10 or 8x10 cabinets.

On stage

The shows run as single sets of roughly seventy to seventy-five minutes in European clubs — Stockholm was billed 20:15 to 21:30, Ronnie Scott's 18:40 to 19:50 — and as two shorter seated sets a night in American jazz rooms. There is no support act and no production to speak of: a small band, amps, and a bass solo listed on the setlist as its own item rather than smuggled into a tune.

The Stockholm setlist on 13 May 2026 ran Introverted Soul, Meat Eater, First Food Then You, Coloured Goddess, the bass solo, and In-N-Out as the encore. Montreal in June kept the same spine — Meat Eater, Coloured Goddess, bass solo — which suggests a tight, repeatable hour rather than a nightly rebuild. Songkick's listing for the Ronnie Scott's night summarised her to a London audience as a player with collaborations behind her including Steve Vai, Guthrie Govan and Stanley Clarke, and as a recent entry on a Top 10 Bassists of the 21st Century list.