[Reader-list] Posting on behave of Naresh Fernandesh (Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellow)

[quraishy]

Hi Peole ,
I am posting this article on the behave of Naresh Fernandesh . He is an 
Independent Fellow of Sarai.
He is working on Jazz Goes To Bollywood.
Thank You,
Quraishy



Jazz Goes To Bollywood

It could only have happened in the Hindi movies. Geeta Bali and Bhagwan 
are swinging through /Shola Jo Bhadke/ in the 1951 classic /Albela/, 
when the camera cuts to the musicians providing the rhythm for their 
terpsichorean fantasies. In keeping with the tune’s throbbing Cuban 
beat, the members of the band are wearing Latinesque frills. Suddenly, 
the leader steps forward and smiles broadly at the audience in a show of 
tribute to his real-life hero, a jazz star from distant New Orleans. 
This is Chic Chocolate, who also was known as the Louis Armstrong of 
India. It’s a crazy, muddled up, wonderful world.

Chic – who was born Antonio Xavier Vaz – was among the Bombay-based Goan 
Roman Catholic musicians who haunted the city’s numerous jazz clubs by 
night, but spent their days blowing up a storm in the Hindi film 
studios. His partners in song included the trumpet players Frank 
Fernand, Peter Monserrate and Chris Perry; the trombonist Anibal Castro; 
and the drummer Lester Godinho. As the titles roll on the Bollywood 
classics of the ’50s, the credit for creating the scores goes to music 
directors like Anil Biswas, C. Ramachandra and Shankan-Jaikishan. But 
the vital contribution of their assistants – who often were Goan jazzmen 
– goes almost unnoticed. *Jazz Goes To Bollywood* will tell the stories 
of the jazz musicians who arranged some of the best-loved Hindi film 
tunes and without whom the Sound of India would never have been created.

The Goan dominance of the Hindi film audioscape is largely a function of 
the structural differences between Indian and Western music. Indian 
classical music is melodic, composed of unilinear ragas. Individual 
vocalists or instrumentalists in this tradition each explore independent 
lines. But to move an audience, film scores must be performed by 
orchestras of massed instruments playing in harmony. Only Goans – with a 
400-year-old heritage of Western music education established by the 
Portuguese who ruled their home territory – knew how to belt out what 
was required.

But in addition to performing the tunes, Goan musicians played a vital 
role in crafting them. That’s because many of the men who composed the 
scores for Hindi films were stepped in the Hindustani music tradition 
and couldn’t write music. Besides, they had only a vague notion of the 
potential of the orchestras they employed. That’s why many of

them hired Goan assistants. To hear old-time jazzmen tell it, the music 
director would come to the studio and sing a line (or pick it out on the 
harmonium) to his Goan amanuensis. The assistant would transcribe the 
melody on sheet paper. But it isn’t as if the assistant was merely 
taking dictation. It was his job to compose the parts for the banks of 
violins and cellos, for the horn sections, the piano and the percussion. 
It was also often his task to craft the introductions and bridges 
between verse and chorus.

Drawing from their experience in the jazz clubs and from their training 
in Western classical music, the Goan music assistants slipped in Bach 
fugues, Portuguese fados and a variety of jazz: Count Basie stomps, 
Dixieland swing, Ellingtonian doodles, earthy blues. It’s clear that 
Bollywood scores would lack their characteristic promiscuous charm if 
but for the efforts of these anonymous Indian jazzmen.

*Jazz Goes To Bollywood* will be a journalistic recounting of how the 
hot music of Bombay’s jazz clubs came to permeate the Hindi film studios 
and will retrace the lives of the Roman Catholic musicians who taught 
India how to jazz it up. Among others, it will follow men like Sebastian 
D’Souza (who did his best-known work for Shankar and Jaikishan between 
1952 and 1975); Chic Chocolate (who assisted C. Ramachandra – the man 
popularly acclaimed for having introduced swing to the Hindi films); the 
legendary Anthony Gonsalves (who taught the composer Pyarelal how to 
play the violin); and Frank Fernand (who worked with such greats as Anil 
Biswas, Hemant Kumar and Kishore Kumar). The project will tell the story 
of how their journeys from Portuguese India through the British Indian 
Empire left a lasting impression on Hindi film music. The project will 
trace the musical innovations they introduced from faraway America – 
innovations whose origins long have been forgotten. For instance, as 
R.D. Burman’s raucous growl continues to thrill listeners, few remember 
that he discovered the sound after hearing Chic Chocolate’s Louis 
Armstrong imitations.

But *Jazz Goes to Bollywood* will do more than merely establish the 
breadth of Bollywood’s influences. It will explore the culture of 
exchange and osmosis that allowed disparate influences to meld together 
under the music director’s baton. In the end, it will throw light on the 
nature of syncreticism in the Hindi film industry as it documents the 
efforts of Indians from various communities to find common ground 
through music.

Posting Number 2

Jazz goes to Bollywood

I’ve spent the month tracking down information about the early history 
of jazz in India and acquiring early jazz recordings made in this 
country. I had interesting interviews with Frank Fernand and Mickey 
Correa, the last surviving Indian jazzmen from the 1930s, the era in 
which the music first established itself in the subcontinent.

Fernand is a Goan trumpet player who learned his art at the Taj Mahal 
Hotel in Mumbai, playing in the African-American dominated bands of 
Crickett Smith and Teddy Weatherford. Mickey Correa is a 
multi-instrumentalist who became the first Indian to lead the dance band 
at the Taj, heading the lineup for 30 years after Independence until 
diphtheria forced him to seek less strenuous employment.

Cricket Smith was an African-American cornet player who played at the 
Taj Mahal Hotel in the 1936-’37 season. His compatriot Weatherford was a 
pianist who led bands with shifting personnel at the same hotel soon 
after. Both of them had respectable reputations in their home country. 
Cricket Smith, born in 1883, had been part of the U.S. music scene at 
the critical movement when jazz was evolving from the more primitive 
forms of vaudeville and ragtime. He made some crucial recordings in 
1913-14 with an outfit led by James Reese Europe, before heading out to 
South America and Asia.

Teddy Weatherford was a pianist whose style was a major influence on the 
legend Earl Hines. He left the U.S. in 1926, spending the rest of his 
career mainly in India and China. He married an Anglo-Indian woman and 
died in Calcutta in 1945.

Both these American musicians played a vital role in teaching Indian 
jazzmen how to play what was then called “hot music”. Both also made 
jazz recordings in the subcontinent. The earliest mention of an 
American-American musician performing in India, though, goes back much 
further: there’s evidence to show that William H. Bernard, a performer 
of a style called minstrelsy, stopped by in the subcontinent on his way 
back from Australia in 1849. Other African-American musicians followed 
him over the next few decades.

The earliest jazz tracks I’ve been able to acquire were made in 1926 by 
Lequime’s Grand Hotel Orchestra, which performed at the famous Calcutta 
hotel. They’re titled “Soho Blues” and “The House Where The Shutters Are 
Green”. An aside: the vocalist and banjo player on these songs is Al 
Bowly, a South African who later found fame in England as the British 
answer to Bing Crosby. He earned the nickname “The Swoon”, evidently a 
description of his effect on the women in the audience.

 From April 1936, I found recordings by Crickett Smith’s outfit of “Taj 
Mahal Foxtrot”, essentially an advertisement for his employer. Teddy 
Weatherford also recorded a few tunes at the time, for the Rex label.

A recording from 1942 of the All Star Swing Band is interesting, among 
other things, for its trumpet player: George Banks, father of the Indian 
jazz legend Louis Banks.

I’ve also managed to track down four recordings by Ken Mac, the 
Anglo-Indian musician who performed regularly around Mumbai. These 
tracks, though, are less jazzy and are merely in the big band style.

Skipping ahead a few decades, I found a 45 recorded in 1966 by Toni 
Pinto, a pianist who led a band for 16 years at Mumbai’s Ambassador. It 
has three tracks, two originals on one side, the standard “Autumn 
Leaves” on the other.

I’d be grateful if any of the readers of this list could point me to 
more Indian jazz recordings. I’m at fernandesn at vsnl.net 
<mailto:fernandesn at vsnl.net>.

Posting Number 3

I used a week last month to head off to Goa to interview a few musicians 
who played an important role in helping Hindi film music develop 
harmonically. The most significant of them was Anthony Gonsalves, who 
gave his name to Amitabh Bachchan’s character in “Amar Akbar Anthony” 
and who is immortalised in the song from that film which begins, “My 
name is Anthony Gonsalves…”

The song was music director Pyarelal’s tribute to his violin teacher. 
But Gonsalves wasn’t just a music instructor. He was an important 
innovator and, in 1958, composed one of the first raga-based symphonies, 
which was performed by a 110-piece orchestra in the quadrangle of St. 
Xavier’s College in Mumbai. The orchestra had an Indian and a Western 
section, each with its own chorus, which sang in Latin, Konkani and 
Hindi. Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey were among the soloists.

Born in the southern Goa village of Majorda in 1927, Gonsalves’s father 
was the director of music at the local church and the younger Gonsalves 
began music lessons at the age of three. After directing church choirs 
himself for a few years, Gonsalves headed to Mumbai in 1943 to try to 
put his talents as a violinist to work in the Hindi film industry. The 
music director Naushad was his first employer. For the first time, 
Gonsalves was exposed to Hindustani music and, as he put it, he “fell in 
love forever”.

Gonsalves was an exception among the Goan Catholic musicians in the 
industry. Most of them thought that Hindi film music was too simplistic 
for their Western classically oriented and jazz-stuffed ears, and 
claimed that playing in the studios was a necessary way of making a 
living. Gonsalves, however, immediately signed up for Hindustani 
lessons: he studied with Pandit Ram Narayan, Pandit Shyam Sunder and 
Ustad Inam Ali Khan.

Using the money he earned from arranging music for more than 100 films, 
Gonsalves eventually put together the Indian Symphony to give voice to 
his attempts to compose harmonic versions of ragas. He scored pieces for 
chamber groups (giving his fantasies such titles as “Sonatina Indiana”) 
as also for the orchestra; his works for the orchestra included 
“Concerto In Raag Sarang” and “Goenchim Xetam”. Gonsalves quit the 
industry in the mid-60s to study at Syracuse University in upstate New York.

I also did an interesting interview with Emiliano D’Cruz, who played 
Latin American music in several Mumbai nightclubs with a group that 
initially called itself Emiliano and his Gay Caballeros until the 
leader, whose grasp on English slang was only tenuous because he’d grown 
up speaking Portuguese, finally realised the implication of the 
adjective. Like so many Goan musicians, D’Cruz took refuge in the studio 
when Mumbai’s nightclubs went into decline, playing violin on countless 
films and attempting unsuccessfully to strike out as a composer in his 
own right: his Portuguese-trained sensibility didn’t allow him to really 
get under the skin of Hindi film tunes, he confessed.