On Black Music Sunday we’ve traveled the (musical) globe, exploring the worldwide appreciation of jazz and other genres of American Black music, and how they’ve been blended with music of other cultures. In honor of the holidays of Diwali and Deepavali—celebrated by over 1 billion people worldwide—what better time to examine the history of jazz in India?
Join me in a celebration and appreciation of a meeting, melding, and marriage of musics, and let’s listen to some of practitioners of what has been called Indo-jazz, or Indo-jazz fusion.
Before jumping into today’s music, know that there are many videos available on YouTube detailing the historical and spiritual significance of Diwali or Deepavali. Though no single explainer can do it all, this 13-minute video from The Best of India channel is a good starting point.
Thank you to Daily Kos Community member AVeng for vetting this source; it was important to me to let a creator based in India do the talking here.
From the very thorough YouTube upload notes:
Diwali is certainly one of the biggest, brightest and most important festivals of India. While Diwali is popularly known as the "festival of lights". The celebration of Diwali as the "victory of good over evil" refers to the light of higher knowledge dispelling all ignorance. While the story behind Diwali and the manner of celebration of the festival differ greatly depending on the region, the essence of the festival remains the same - the celebration of life, its enjoyment and goodness.The word Diwali is derived from the Sanskrit term "Deepavali", which translates to "Rows of lamps". Based on the Hindu lunar calendar, Diwali falls between October and November on an Amavasya or moonless night. Celebrated as the victory of good over evil, the festival is associated with the legend of the Hindu god, Lord Ram's return to his kingdom Ayodhya, after 14 years in exile. The Demon king Ravan of Lanka had abducted Lord Ram's consort Sita only to invite his own death as a result. Lord Ram, along with his brother Laxman and an army of monkeys defeated and killed Ravan and returned to his kingdom with Sita. According to mythology the people of Ayodhya lit up clay lamps known as diyas to welcome him on his return from exile.
Diwali is a five-day affair and kicks off with Dhanteras. 'Dhan' means wealth, hence this day is considered auspicious for buying items related to prosperity like utensils or gold. Vijay and his family also plan to buy something in keeping with the customs of Dhanteras. The day after Dhanteras is known as Narak Chaudas or Choti Diwali. In short, it is Diwali on a smaller scale, with fewer rituals. Hindus get up before dawn, clean their houses, take a fragrant bath and dress up in festive clothes. Vijay and his family follow suit; they are decorating their house with much excitement to invite Goddess Lakshmi. The whole family rejoices on the occasion by singing aartis or religious hymns while they take part in the puja. The third day of the festival, also known as Lakshmi puja, is the main Diwali celebration. The day is devoted to Goddess Lakshmi - Goddess of Wealth and Lord Ganesh, the 'Lord of auspicious Beginnings' and 'the Remover of Obstacles'. The devotees worship them seeking prosperity and wealth.Govardhan puja is the fourth day of the Diwali festival. In some parts of India this day is also known as 'Annakoot'. Legend says that Lord Indra, the Hindu Lord of rain and the king of gods, got angry with the people of the land of Gokul, the birthplace of Lord Krishna. To punish the villagers, the rain god poured out endless rain flooding the village. However, Lord Krishna came to the rescue of the village and sheltered the villagers under Govardhan hill by lifting the entire hill onto his little finger, thereby protecting the villagers and their livestock. Since then this day is celebrated to thank Lord Krishna.
This day is also known as Padwa in some parts of the country and people visit their friends and family with gifts and goodies on this day. Vijay's family has a tradition of celebrating this day. The women of the family and neighborhood make a cow dung hillock to perform the ritual of the day. The hillock is built symbolizing Govardhan hill and then decorated with flowers and other elements. The menfolk then pay obeisance to this symbolic hillock by circling around it and singing religious songs. Vijay and Vishal joins in the prayers. Bhai Duj marks the end of the five days of the Diwali celebrations. Diwali is known as the festival of lights but with so many rituals and traditions it can also be named as the festival of sweets, gifts, fireworks and family.
Now, onto the music.
Many non-South Asian music fans in the U.S. were introduced to the sound of Indian instruments, like the sitar, via collaborations between rock musicians like The Beatles, who performed with Ravi Shankar and other Indian instrumentalists starting in the mid 1960s. Much less is known or talked about when it comes to far earlier collaborations and musical cross-pollination between jazz musicians from the U.S. and Indian musicians in India’s largest city, once known as Bombay—now Mumbai—as well as from Goa.
This intriguing Black History Month tweet from the U.S. consulate in Mumbai offers no details, but It did, however, make me curious about the introduction of jazz into India.
The most eye-opening and comprehensive book I have found is 2012’s Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, by journalist and Scroll.in editor Naresh Fernandes.
About the book
In 1935, a violinist from Minnesota named Leon Abbey brought the first “all-negro” jazz band to Bombay, leaving a legacy that would last three decades. Only a few years after Abbey’s arrival, swing would find its way to the streets of India as it influenced Hindi film music – the very soundtrack of Indian life. The optimism of jazz became an important element in the tunes that echoed the hopes of newly independent India.
This book tells the story of India – and especially the city of Bombay – through the lives of a menagerie of geniuses, strivers and eccentrics, both Indian and American, who helped jazz find a home in the sweaty subcontinent. They include the burly African-American pianist Teddy Weatherford; the Goan trumpet player Frank Fernand, whose epiphanic encounter with Gandhi drove him to try to give jazz an Indian voice; Chic Chocolate, who was known as the Louis Armstrong of India; Anthony Gonsalves, who lent his name to one of the most popular Hindi film tunes ever; and many more.
Taj Mahal Foxtrot, at its heart, is a history of Bombay in swing time.
Ahead of a local event featuring Fernandes, Brian Lynch reviewed Taj Mahal Foxtrot for Vancouver, British Columbia’s Georgia Straight in 2015.
As for players born on the subcontinent, many were of Anglo-Indian or Parsi backgrounds, but the greatest number hailed from Goa, the small state on the southwest coast that remained a Portuguese colony until 1961. As Taj Mahal Foxtrot describes, the Goan system of parochial schools in place at the time taught children to read western musical charts and play such instruments as the saxophone and clarinet. This, Fernandes notes, had already made Goan players “musicians of empire”, the backbone of local marching bands and opera-house orchestras. But it was jazz that electrified them. “Frank Fernand said the one thing they wanted to learn how to do was to play like Negroes, in the phraseology of the time,” Fernandes says, referring to one of the most prominent Goan horn players in India’s early jazz scene, and one of his central interview subjects. “There was something about the African-American abandon that they saw, but also the complete mastery of the instruments, that completely struck a chord with them. That was something they wanted to be able to replicate.”
The goal was not mimicry but rather the invention of new forms that drew on India’s own long history of improvised music. Fernand himself helped pioneer this, with a fervour that was soon shaped by the political and social conscience of the era. “Frank Fernand had a famous audience with Gandhi in 1948 which changed his ideas about how he saw jazz,” Fernandes points out. “And so by 1948, he was performing Indian themes in a jazz style.”
The resulting mix dominated the scores written for Bombay’s booming film industry in the 1950s, turning it into the soundtrack of Indian popular culture. It also fully revealed one of the most fascinating undercurrents traced in Fernandes’s book: a long-standing parallel between the African-American campaign for civil rights and the Indian drive for independence from British colonial rule.
For a detailed introduction to some of the history covered in Fernandes’ book, the author’s “story of love, longing and jazz in 1960s Bombay” was reprinted by Quartz India.
It is a long piece, and opens with the abusive love story between Indian nightclub band leader Chick Perry and his young vocalist Lorna Cordeiro. We’ll skip right to the jazz—though I do suggest you read the whole mesmerizing piece—and start with Dave Brubeck’s arrival in Bombay.
Dave Brubeck was impressed enough by the local musicians to attempt to make some recordings with them during his visit. But Bombay defeated him. He later recounted the episode to an interviewer: “The current fluctuated in Bombay in those days and so the tape would speed up and slow down. Like, when you were shaving, the speed of the motor would go up and down. It ruined one of my favourite tapes I’ve ever made.” Another visiting jazzman, the pianist Hampton Hawes, was overwhelmed by problems that were rather more basic. “Bombay turned me around,” he wrote. “I’d never seen poverty before.” Art, he decided, was irrelevant amidst the gnawing deprivation. “Here I was thinking about making a big splash, a hit record, going home a hero, and I’m walking the streets with motherfuckers who don’t even know what a piece of bread is, let along Stravinsky or Charlie Parker. If Bird was alive and played for them they wouldn’t be able to hear him because they’d be too damn hungry.”
Admittedly, jazz had always been the preserve of Bombay’s elite. But while the audiences were upper crust, the musicians who cooked up the syncopated rhythms were not. Like Toni Pinto, Ronnie Monserrate, Chris and Lorna, the majority were Roman Catholics strivers from the former Portuguese colony of Goa, 550 kilometres south of Bombay. They’d been an important part of the Bombay music scene since the 1920s, when Bombay began to develop its appetite for what was then called “hot music”. Jazz had made its way from New Orleans in the waxy grooves of phonograph records and travelled over the oceans with touring American bands that played for the administrators of the Raj. Bombay’s first jazz concerts were performed at the Bandstand, south of the Oval. Among the earliest jazzmen to play an extended stint in Bombay was Leon Abbey, a violinist from Minnesota, who led an eight-piece band at the Taj during the 1935-’36 season. Abbey wore white tails on stage and played the freshest sounds. He told one interviewer, “I kept up with the latest numbers because someone would always come up to the bandstand and say, ‘Old Bean, would you play so and so…’, because as far as he was concerned, we should know how to play everything that had ever been written.” Midway through the trip, the Taj management sent Abbey and saxophonist Art Lanier back to New York to pick up the latest music.
[...]
In 1938, pianist Teddy Weatherford, who had played with Louis Armstrong, took the stage with his men. His swinging style and treble voicing had been an important influence on jazz during its formative years. The Taj, it would seem, wasn’t quite the genteel venue it now is—not at least from the way Weatherford’s occasional Russian bassist named ‘Innocent Nick’ described the gigs to the jazz magazine Storyville. “Teddy used to play downstairs, in the Tavern of the Taj, for the soldiers, sailors and others, a very rough place,” Nick said. “Teddy would play for hours without a break. Even with drinks, he would continue one-handed. He had tremendous hands.” For the African-American musicians, Bombay provided refuge from the apartheid in the U.S. Men like Weatherford and his sidemen, such as the saxophonist Roy Butler, spent long years shuttling between Europe and the subcontinent, where racial barriers seemed non-existent, at least for them. Butler’s years in India as a Weatherford sideman, he told Storyville, were among his happiest—the work was relatively easy, the pay and conditions good, he was treated splendidly by both management and clientele, and enjoyed the luxurious life under the British Raj. The Taj management, on its part, honoured Weatherford by naming a dish after him: Poires Glace Weatherford. (The absence of colour prejudice was only to be expected. After all, industrial baron Jamshetji Tata was moved to build the Taj after being prevented one leisurely Bombay evening from dining at the Europeans-only Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel. Later, he famously hung a notice in the Taj forbidding entry to South Africans and dogs.)
I enjoyed this 45-minute lecture about this period given by Fernandes at that 2015 event in Vancouver; his historiography is enhanced by his wonderful sense of humor.
One of the top jazz bands of India was headed by Chic Chocolate.
Chic Chocolate was a jazz musician from Goa who was considered by many to be ‘India’s Louis Armstrong.’
He was born Antonio Xavier Vaz in the village of Aldona in Goa where he learnt to play music at school. Making a career playing music, let alone Western music, in India was not the easiest thing to do in the ‘30s and ‘40s. While some may argue that it isn’t easy even today, it’s safe to say that going against his mother’s wishes for him to be a mechanic back then must’ve taken some courage.
The American jazz legend Louis Armstrong was his musical hero and Vaz modeled aspects of his performance around Armstrong’s distinctive style. He began playing in a jazz group called the Spotlights, but by 1945, he had his own group - Chic and the Music Makers. The band reportedly beat 12 other city jazz groups to earn a contract at the Green’s Hotel. It was watching the band live that encouraged the Bollywood music composer C Ramachandra to hire these musicians to perform in studio recordings.
Give Chic a listen.
Since those early days of Indian jazz, the music scene has definitely changed. Take, for example, this Joe Harriott collaboration with John Mayer—that’s the renowned Indo-Anglo composer, not the American singer-songwriter best known for 2002’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”
Harriott and Mayer’s Indo Jazz Suite received a stellar review from music critic Thom Jurek at All Music.
At long last, Caribbean saxophonist Joe Harriott's classic collaboration with Calcutta composer and conductor John Mayer is back in print on this Koch CD reissue of the original Atlantic LP from 1967. In England in the 1960s, Harriott was something of a vanguard wonder on the order of Ornette Coleman. And while the comparisons flew fast and furious and Harriott was denigrated as a result, the two men couldn't have been more different. For one thing, Harriott was never afraid to swing. This work, written and directed by Mayer, offered the closest ever collaboration and uniting of musics East and West. Based almost entirely in the five-note raga -- or tonic scale that Indian classical music emanates from -- and Western modalism, the four ragas that make up the suite are a wonder of tonal invention and modal complexity, and a rapprochement to Western harmony. The band Harriott assembled here included his own group -- pianist Pat Smythe, bassist Coleridge Goode, and drummer Allan Ganley -- as well as trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, flutist Chris Taylor, Diwan Mothar on sitar, Chandrahas Paiganka on tamboura, and Keshan Sathe on tabla, with Mayer playing violin and Harriott on his alto.
Have a listen. The Suite is a delightful 36 minutes and change.
While we listen, let’s get to know the musicians; at just 44 years old, Harriot joined the ancestors in 1973, while Mayer passed in 2004, well into his 70s.
From the All That Jazz profile of Joe Harriott:
Joseph Arthurlin 'Joe' Harriott was a Jamaican jazz musician and composer, whose principal instrument was the alto saxophone.
Initially a bebopper, he is now widely acknowledged as one of the worldwide pioneers of free jazz. He was educated at Kingston's famed Alpha Boys School, which produced a number of prominent Jamaican musicians. He moved to the UK as a working musician in 1951 and lived in the country for the rest of his life. Harriott was part of a wave of Caribbean jazz musicians who arrived in Britain during the 1950s, including Dizzy Reece, Harold McNair, Harry Beckett and Wilton Gaynair.
John Mayer’s full biography can be found on his website.
John Henry Basil Mayer was born 28th October 1929 in Eden Hospital Calcutta, to an Anglo-Indian father and a Tamil mother. The Mayer family settled in Calcutta in 1770 as part of the East India Company, but bad financial management over the coming centuries saw John Mayer born in to abject poverty.
His musical interests manifested themselves early, and at seven he was studying violin with Phillipe Sandre at the Calcutta School of Music, who agreed to teach him in his free time, because Mayer’s parents lacked the resources to send him there as a paying pupil. He later studied with Melhi Metha, who encouraged him, while in his late teens, to compete for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. By then, Mayer was determined to become a composer who would be taken seriously both in his own country and abroad. He also wanted to achieve this utilising both European and Indian techniques, and toward this end he studied with Sanathan Mukherjee, who taught him the theoretical aspects of Indian classical music.
A key figure in jazz from India is Louiz Banks, who’s still going strong at age 81 and is sometimes referred to as “the godfather of Indian jazz.” The Hindustani Times reviewed his 2021 biography by Ashis Ghatak.
Banks was born Dambar Bahadur Budapriti in Darjeeling; his father, Pushkar Bahadur Budapriti, was a trumpet player who was renamed “George Banks” by his bandmates. In turn, George Banks renamed his son “Louis,” for Louis Armstrong.
Banks would grow to admire the piano playing of Oscar Peterson, and later in life, the jazz fusion sound of Herbie Hancock. He was “discovered” by famed Bollywood music director and composer Rahul Dev Burman (RD Burman), aka “Pancham,” who scored over 300 Bollywood films.
Here’s a short biography on Banks.
From the YouTube text:
[W]e’re talking about the Godfather of Jazz in India, an ace Pianist and a composer – Louiz Banks. Louiz Banks’ musical journey started in the year 1970 in Calcutta and since then he never looked back and continued his exponential growth within the music fraternity, playing alongside musicians like RD Burman, music director Bappi Lahiri and renowned music composing duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal on their various projects. After nearly six decades since he started playing the Piano professionally, Jazz legend Louiz Banks’ love-affair with music grows stronger by the second. Watch the icon talk about his journey, from a club in Calcutta to the upper echleons of musical greatness.
Banks plays straight-ahead jazz piano; this instrumental solo from his 2014 album Introspection is a great example of his work.
When playing with his son Gino and other artists, Banks also offers up Indo-jazz fusion, like this performance of “Timeless,” from the father-son duo’s 2017 album Fever Cubano.
After I happened to mention what I was planning to write about today in a comment a few days ago, one of our regular Black Music Sunday readers, our own Warren S, dropped me a note. Turns out he is a member of an Indo-Jazz fusion group himself!
Happy Diwali and Deepavali to those who celebrate, and for those who don’t, just relax and enjoy the music. Lots more to come in the comments. I hope you’ll join me.