Dissertation
Course: Post Colonialism
Name: Deeptarko Chowdhury
Class: PG II
Roll no.: 55
Date: 11/05/2015
Post
Colonialism
Jazz in India: A Gumbo of Musical Elements
Contemporary jazz music in India is
multifaceted although the overall popularity of jazz music appears to have
declined since its golden age in the mid 20th century, when the
genre was incorporated into Hindi film music. Jazz survives, thrives and jives
in many forms across India, often as a “gumbo of different styles” [1],
to borrow Don Cherry’s expression. The epicentre of this epic cultural
trajectory can be traced back to the Portuguese colony of Goa where Indian
musicians received formal musical education in the western classical tradition
which was mostly disseminated by cathedrals and later by schools. Formal
training in this tradition afforded them the scope to study jazz music which
had recently been introduced to the subcontinent, specifically through clubs in
Bombay, Goa and Calcutta. It facilitated the understanding of musical
structures, progressions, scales, modes, harmonies, interval and counterpoint.
While the aesthetic approach of the two traditions was vastly different, they
were encoded in the same script. Jazz was a break from the traditional western
classical system in terms of how it incorporated scales, modes and
unconventional harmonic intervals, venturing out of regular tonalities.
In the western classical tradition, the text
is the master and the will is submitted to the text. Pieces are meticulously
and elaborately structured, adhering to strict compositional rules. Performers
follow the text and performance instructions to the letter. There is no scope
for improvisation or for interactions such as the alaap or the jugalbandhi, as
such. The scope for interpretation is also guided and sometimes limited by
elaborate performance directions and there is absolutely no scope for altering the
text.
In jazz however, the will is submitted to the
music and to the performance. The structure of the pieces is a lot more
flexible and the music is based on the idea of spontaneity and improvisation.
The text is more open ended and is designed to assist interpretations of
various sorts, which contributes to jazz music’s ability to be easily adapted
and appropriated. The radical alteration of textual material is not only
allowed but encouraged. The compositional approach of jazz is also vastly
different from that of the western classical tradition. It is a lot more
interactive.
Jazz music was originally an African-American
phenomenon, underlying which is a complex and rich history of the literal and
Hegelian master-slave dialectic. The master’s tools were used to dismantle his
house, so much so, that the music of the African-American peoples became part
of the American globalisation and nationalist agenda during the Cold War, by
which time jazz had already branched into different and more sophisticated forms.
Jazz was a diasporic music that had travelled from the African continent with
the enslaved and colonised subjects to America and developed as a cultural
phenomenon, unique to a specific time and space. Jazz was the sound of
liberation, of soul searching and of unique melodic temperaments. It was a
break from the rigidity of western classical music, which to them, was symbolic
of the oppressive mind. Jazz music was not the music of struggle, but an escape
from it. It was flexible, accommodating and free and therefore became a very
popular art form and a form of entertainment around the world. When the
American state realised and recognised the popularity of jazz, it sponsored
jazz musicians such as Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others
on tours to places such as India. In India, the Taj Mahal hotel of Bombay was
instrumental in the development of the jazz scene. The Taj Mahal hotel was the
hub of entertainment for the colonisers and the Indian elite, and one of their
most thriving attractions was their eclectic selection of jazz acts. The first
wave of jazz musicians who came to India in the 1920s and 1930s, performed at
venues such as the Taj in Bombay and Goa. These musicians were primarily
African American musicians who had brought their music to the subcontinent. The
clubs would resound with the syncopation of ragtime beats and the sounds of New
Orleans. The Goan musicians, already trained in the western classical
tradition, picked up the jazz form from these touring musicians, back when jazz
tours to India were a frequent occurrence. One of the milestone developments
was American jazz violinist Leon Abbey’s visit to India. His band was the first
authentic ‘negro’ band to play in India, at the Taj. Leon Abbey stayed on till
1939 and had been instrumental in mentoring the local jazz musicians of the
time. This period of live music was followed by the age of vinyl records which
allowed musicians to buy records of legendary performers of various styles of
jazz such as ragtime, swing and bebop. They could now listen to and analyse the
performances of the jazz masters of America.
Attempts were made in the subcontinent, by
indigenous musicians, to unravel jazz, by analysing its elements, armed with
the knowledge of western classical music theory and the rudimentary theoretical
and technical knowledge of jazz that had travelled across the shore. The
availability of records, more than anything else, at that time and later on,
helped popularise this previously esoteric art form.
The first wave of musicians of Indian origin,
to have an impact on the developing jazz scene in India were the likes of
Mickey Correa, Chic Chocolate and Franz Fernand, only a handful of whose
records survive. Their craft evolved further when through America’s cultural
expeditions (“to unite the coloured peoples of the world”[2])
they came in contact with the aforementioned jazz greats, interactions with
whom shed light on the American perspective on jazz music, as opposed to the subcontinental
understanding, which had already taken its own unique course. Interactions
between the musicians, both Indian and western would take place at these clubs
and their language was music. Tony Pinto recalls in an interview, how his band
got an opportunity to play and interact with Dave Brubeck, right after both
their performances at the Taj. Mickey Correa’s daughter recalls how her father,
the Louis Armstrong of Bombay got to meet his hero, and transformed his playing
after receiving brief but insightful instructions from Armstrong. It would not
be uncommon to encounter famous American jazz musicians walking down the
streets of Bandra and Nariman Point, or sometimes at nearby hooch dens (this
was during the prohibition) where some memorable exchanges between musicians
took place. These interactions were immortalised in Leon Abbey’s song “Karim’s
Blues” about Karim’s hooch den, right around the corner from the Taj. The stage
not only promoted interaction between the east and west, but the musicians who
would come to India would often return to America and collaborate with each
other; Leon Abbey’s later collaboration with Crickett Smith, the performer of
the famous “Tajmahal Foxtrot”, (a tribute to Taj Mahal hotel, composed by Mena
Silas, a Bagdadi Jew) for example. The Indian jazz musicians had already
appropriated jazz in their own Indian way, long before the likes of John
Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, John McLaughlin, Yousef Lateef and Jan Garbarek had
approached jazz in an ‘Indian’ way. While the former is more akin to
traditional American jazz, it was a uniquely Indian phenomenon. “Both Crickett
Smith and Teddy Weatherford recruited Indian musicians to play with them,
teaching them how to ‘to play like negroes’. By that, their Indian sidemen
meant that the African-Americans taught them to improvise fearlessly, to go out
on a limb for their art, to play straight from the heart”[3].
The performances were directed specifically towards an Indian audience of
western music by Indian western musicians and rarely did the acts travel
abroad, unlike the acts of the second phase of Indo-jazz music. One of the
reasons why the Indian jazz of the first age has not survived is because once
the colonisers left the country, the popularity of live jazz acts decreased and
rock n’ roll began to dominate the western music scene. Apart from this, the
audience was already limited and niche. One of the saddest aspects is that very
few recordings were made during this amazing age of Indian jazz music and barely
any have survived.
The
upshot of the veritable end of the first phase of Indian jazz was the eventual
unemployment of live musicians who resorted to the music studios of Bombay’s
thriving Hindi film industry. Modelled on Hollywood, it had adapted and
appropriated the soundscapes of the classical Hollywood age, which employed a
lot of jazz, as did Bollywood, especially in diegetic music. This led to the
demand of orchestrators and arrangers who could rearrange and reharmonise the
monophonic vocal melody of the Hindi and Urdu lyrics.[4]
The Bollywood studio or session musicians at this time were mostly Hindustani
classical musicians who worked in conjunction with live jazz musicians. Some of
these musicians acted in double capacity as arranger and performer, such as the
famous Anthony Gonsalves who also a versatile composer and was later canonised
in the largely successful commercial song “My Name is Anthony Gonsalves”, from
the film “Amar, Akbar, Anthony”, by his student Pyarelal of the musical duo
Lakshmikant-Pyarelal. Other unsung orchestrators of the characteristic soundscape
of Bollywood were none other than erstwhile moguls of the indigenous Indian
live jazz scene, Chic Chocolate, Mickey Correa, Franz Fernand and Tony Pinto,
all of whom carried their western classical and jazz influence into the
Bollywood studios and imparted to Bollywood, the intricately orchestrated
musical texture that is omnipresent in the films of this age. A lot of the
Bollywood session musicians had been live jazz musicians and when they worked
with the director, composer or arranger, they would interact with the music and
with each other, to create this unique blend of the two styles. The
compositional approach was usually interactive and dynamic, as was the case
with jazz. But sadly the works of these composers and musicians have largely
gone uncredited and have been overshadowed by the title and stardom of the
music director and names such as R. D. Burman, Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi.
The free-flowing approach of jazz to creating music, helped the creative and
recording process because it afforded the scope for interaction and
improvisation, while adhering to the basic of the musical texts, to maintain a
tight overall structure in the studio where the musicians were mostly tracked
live, especially in orchestras. In jazz music, pieces were often composed and
improvised around melodic motifs, as can be heard in the sounds of big swing
bands, and the Bollywood compositional approach was also rather similar. Session
musicians (Hindustani, western, jazz and pop) would work in tandem with
composers, arrangers or directors and craft a polyphonic harmonised soundscape around
a monophonic vocal melody, adding to it, reaffirming it and reimagining it.
This was the golden age of Indian jazz. The consequences of this unprecedented
burgeoning of jazz musicians in the music studios of Bollywood were that jazz
became an integral part of Indian musical palette and dominated the arrangement
and orchestration of the commercial Indian musical scene even during the rise
of disco, till it gradually began to fade during the 1990s. Following in the
footsteps of Bollywood, a lot of regional film industries started appropriating
jazz in their own way across the nation, causing ears all across the nation to ring
with the unconventional sounds of jazz music, in a familiar context. The genre
of Bolly-pop-jazz still survives in songs like “Badtameez Dil”, the brass band
version of “Emotional Aytachaar” or sometimes anachronistically in the music of
period films such as “Once Upon a Time in Mumbai” or “Exposé”.
While Bollywood had appropriated jazz in its
own unique way, other musical movements incorporating and integrating jazz were
taking place all over the country. It
was around then that the second phase of Indian jazz started developing. Western
jazz artists collaborated with Indian artists who were trained in both schools
of music, eastern and western (sometimes both classical and jazz). Their music started
interacting to create a fantastic blend of the two styles by adapting analogous
eastern classical elements such as improvisation, interaction and call and
response (traditional African music made use of a monophonic melody and
call-and-response pattern), odd time signatures, syncopated rhythm, and
improvised syllabic vocal percussion (Carnatic classical Konnakol and
Hindustani classical tabla-bols). These styles were also incorporated into the
practice of scat singing, along with improvised vocal melody (the basis of
which is analogous to the western classical solfège method) and all these contributed
to the development of modal jazz. Modal jazz could easily accommodate Indian
ragas over dynamically changing polyphonic harmonic content, which is to say
that the ragas could now be played or sung over chord progressions, the emotion
of which could change dynamically depending on what substitution of the basic
chord was being employed. This can be heard in the sounds of “Impressions” by
John Coltrane or in the sounds of Shakti or The Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Coltrane addressed ragas in as dynamic a way
as he approached the harmonic content and “rather than organise tonal material
using the structure of a specific raga, he was more interested in the ‘spirit
of the music’ and not so much the specifics of the music”[5]
and “if one wanted to make an analogy with Coltrane's music and Indian cultural
traditions, the closest link would be the Bhakti movement within India, and the
idea that ecstatic trances can provide conduits to higher consciousness”[6].
McLaughlin on the other hand engaged with it in a more traditional manner,
especially with Carnatic music. But while the two different forms are analogous
they are vastly different and have completely different philosophical and
aesthetic approaches. Eastern classical music itself is tremendously variegated
and the musical approach differs from tradition to tradition. But with these
new developments, jazz musicable to attract a larger audience towards this
integrated art form. It was familiar yet new.
In fact, the Carnatic classical music of the 20th
and 21st century is more a product of the colonial world and is
immensely influenced by and indebted to western classical music and eventually
jazz, evidenced through the heavy incorporation and appropriation of the
European classical violin in the works of players such as V. G. Jog or the
saxophone (both a classical and jazz instrument) in the work of players such as
Kadri Gopalnath and his students, the sisters M. S. Lavanya and M. S.
Subbalakshmi. Although musicologist Amanda Weidman claims that the violin which
is fretless, is capable of recreating the unique and intricate Carnatic
microtonal ornaments called gamakas, but the reeds of the saxophone are
incapable of producing these nuances, as was admitted by the maestro Gopalnath
himself.
The relationship between the two forms of
music had become more symbiotic and complementary during the second phase,
while in the first phase, indigenous eastern elements had been less
significantly employed, if only, as embellishments and ornaments rather than as
a complementary and equally significant aspect.
Collaborations by musicians such as Zakir
Hussain, Ravi Shankar, L. Shankar, L. Subramaniam, Vikku Vinayakram, Trilok
Gurtu, Sivamani, Selva Ganesh, Ranjit Barot, Carlton Kitto, Louiz Banks, Pam
Crain, Don Saigal and Tanmay Bose with musicians such as Bud Shank, John
McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Stephane Grappelli, Don Cherry, Jonas Hellborg,
Shawn Lane and Stanley Clarke led to the consolidation of Indo-jazz as a genre
in both the western and eastern world. The collaborations during the first
phase with musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Leon Abbey, Dave Brubeck and Duke
Ellington had been limited to traditional American jazz where Indian western
musicians were collaborating mostly with American musicians while the second
phase follows a complex trajectory of the appropriation and is a lot more
progressively structured.
One of the earlier collaborations was that of Ravi
Shankar’s with flautist Bud Shank, during which he had interacted with pianist
Alice Coltrane, the wife of John Coltrane and it was due to Shankar’s influence
that we are able to hear albums such as “Impressions” by John Coltrane or
“Journey in Sat Chit Ananda” by Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders.
John McLaughlin’s introduction to eastern
music had been through his spiritual guru, Sri Chinmoy and he had actually
spent a lot of time in India, learning the concepts of Carnatic music and
moving on to Hindustani classical through his interaction with musicians such
as L. Shankar and Zakir Hussain. The sound of L. Shankar’s electric violin,
which was a perfect blend of eastern and western sensibilities and
technological advancement, also drove McLaughlin’s music by perfectly
complementing his guitar playing. Shankar’s tone was sometimes very similar to
mildly overdriven sustained guitar notes or fast legato articulations on the
guitar, and McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar was fitted with sympathetic strings tuned
to the root and the fifth and had scalloped frets (frets that were scraped and
hollowed out to allow the strings to be pulled inwards to produce micro-tonal
pitches). This appropriated the sound of the sitar while allowing him to play
chords (unlike the sitar) of various tonalities. Their music explored different
structures, experimenting with changing time signatures, key signatures and
modes, that is to say that the rhythm, the scale and the tonal quality of the
scale kept changing dynamically. Interestingly, it managed to maintain a tight
structure and achieved smooth transitions that were made possible by well
thought out musical phrases, and a return to the root, to reinstate a sense of
home.
Trilok Gurtu’s playing repertoire is more than
an average person’s listening repertoire and he incorporates a lot of his
influences, both western and eastern in the percussion section and is usually
complemented in terms of groove by the electric bass guitar. Gurtu on the other
hand returns to the root melodically through his perfectly pitched/tuned drums
and by returning rhythmically to the one, all the while accenting the odd beats
in the Carnatic style. “In a 1995 television special on Jimi Hendrix, Gurtu
mentioned having initially learned Western music without awareness of
overdubbing, which, he said, forced him to learn multiple parts which most
musicians would have never attempted”[7]. This
anecdote also sheds light upon how developments in recording technology such as
the shift from live recordings to individually tracked instruments, shaped
certain aesthetic aspects of music.
Herbie Hancock’s collaboration with L.
Subramaniam in “Blossom” created a completely new sound. In tracks such as
“Inner Peace”, Hancock’s playing and harmonic arrangement is reminiscent of
Debussy’s impressionistic piano playing. Complementing the piano is the violin,
playing sustained and improvised melodies. The structure is very western
classical, but the approach is very jazz and played with a certain Carnatic
sensibility. Grappeli and Subramaniam’s collaboration also sounds very unlike
either of their earlier musical endeavours, even in terms of the instrumentation,
which made use of the developing midi and synthesiser technology of the time.
Their rendition of “Paganini Caprice 5” is in the style of the neo-classical
music of Malmsteem, not rubato (with a free-flowing dynamic tempo or pace) and
synced with mechanical precision to the metronome, but it sounds groovy due to
its syncopated rhythm.
While the international jazz scene was being
dominated by these world musicians, the local scene was a lot more isolated and
was still a domain of the Anglo Indian or Christian communities. The Calcutta
bebop acts of Carlton Kitto, Pam Crain, Louiz Banks and the like barely ever
travelled abroad. Their music was reminiscent of Coltrane, Monk and Gillespie. Singer
Pam Crain had also collaborated with Bollywood composer Braz Gonsalves. Their
music was very bluesy, and used a big brass section and a characteristically
clean jazz guitar. It also incorporated ragas. “Raga Rock” is one such track,
which is actually not very rock at all, apart from the drumming which has a
swingy approach. It builds up through an ‘alaap’ and loops into a section where
soloists interact with each other and have conversations, followed by a drum
solo leading into the crescendo. This was around the 1970s but in another part
of the country a completely different kind movement was taking place. The song
“Jaipur” by Jamaican saxophone player Joe Harriot and Goan guitarist Amancio
D’silva is a perfect example of how uniquely different the music was; “Here the
fusion continues in perhaps a slightly more subtle fashion. D'Silva draws upon
the jazz guitar tradition of Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Wes
Montgomery, but sneaks in aspects of the Indian vocal tradition on the title
track and Norma Winstone's vocals on the opening slide effortlessly from Indian
popular song styles to snatches of "My Favourite Things". On the
opening, there are Latin rhythmic inflections, on "Ballad for Goa"
shades of Portuguese Fado and on the closing track, what to these ears sound
like a precursor of the fusion music that was to become immensely popular in
the 1970s”[8].
Tracks such as “Stephano’s Dance” from the same album, “Hum Dono” (the two of
us) had experimented with polyrhythmic structures which imparted to it a very
‘tribal’ percussive emotion which was enhanced by a tremendously melodically
approach. From the sound of the record, it seems that the drum-kit had many
pieces all accommodating different notes. D’silva’s playing is very original.
Even though he combines different influences, he renders them in a most
original fashion. Joe Harriot has also collaborated with Calcutta based jazz
composer, John Mayer in the 1970s and released “Indo Jazz Suite” which is
tremendously difficult to categorise into any kind of style because its
elements are so varied and so well integrated. The music is very complex even
though it is not difficult to listen to. It truly is an Indo jazz suite. Songs
like “Mishra’s Blues” for example, which is possibly influenced by Miles
Davis’s “All Blues”, traces of which can be heard in the arrangement of the
brass section, is complemented so perfectly by the Hindustani classical
elements that one truly is convinced that it is in fact Mishra’s blues. It
somehow narrates a story of a tradition. “Multani” is another such track, the
basis of which is modal raga exploration. What is interesting to listen to, is
the contrapuntal drum and tabla solo and the ascending and descending raga played
with a syncopated rhythm on the sitar, being complemented by harmonies in
thirds and fifths by wind instruments and by a contrapuntal (melodically)
walking bass-line also complementing a melody line on the alto saxophone. It is
very well structured and follows the text very rigidly. All these amazing
localised developments in jazz music were taking place around country in the
1970s and they were so vastly different from each other that it is
mindboggling. Some very complex and intricate pieces of music have been
composed during this time, a lot of which is lost, and those which have
survived have never received much attention. But the legacies of these
musicians have survived into the third phase with their Indian students such as
guitarist Amyt Datta of Pink Noise and Skinny Alley, percussionist Monojit
Datta of Latin jazz bands Orient Express and Los Amigos and Grammy award
nominated jazz keyboardist Louiz Banks, taking it forward. The local musicians
of the second phase have been the sole educators in the realm of jazz music.
Ironically in the third phase, the inclination has apparently been more towards
other forms of music as was documented in “Finding Carlton” a film about
Calcutta’s lost jazz scene, where Carlton Kitto’s student claims that he is a
Bengali with no jazz in his blood and that he is ready to move on to Bollywood.
This harrowing inclusion introduces the viewer to the base stereotype that jazz
is something that belongs to Christians and the Anglo Indians in India, since
the jazz music or the western music scene has been dominated by them. It
reinforces the stereotypes perpetuated by Bollywood which had managed to
systematically sideline the community, by often depicting them as intoxicated,
wastrels who spoke a different dialect, more often than not played a musical
instrument and enjoyed parties, western music and were sometimes promiscuous. It
was a complete misrepresentation of a diverse community of people across an
entire nation, homogenised into an object of ridicule. Somehow conversely,
music became one of the only ways of asserting their identities and the
consolidation of this musical identity made the dynamics between the Anglo
Indian and Christian community with the rest of the nation more problematic.
Apart from these developments which could be said
to be global or ‘world’, indigenous jazz musicians such as Chris Perry had
changed the face of Konkani folk music by introducing jazz elements into their
music. He also helped popularise the form by integrating elements of both
worlds together. Composers such as Salil Chowdhury revolutionised the face of
modern Bengali music with compositions such as “Aamar Protibaader Bhasha”,
“Chalo Chalo” featuring George Biswas on vocals or “She Din Aaro Koto Dure”
which he sang himself. And on the other hand South Indian and Bengali films had
started borrowing from these sounds; some memorable songs are Rajkumar’s “Tic
Tic Tic” or Chhabi Biswas’s “Ei Duniyai Bhaai Shobi Hoye” or “Aamarey Joubon”
from “Sharey Chutattor”.
India has had a rich history and tradition of
music and it has been quick to adapt and borrow from the music of non
indigenous peoples, but western music paved the way for indigenous Indian
polyphonic music, especially in Indian pop music.
Jazz is now a global phenomenon and its
free-flowing flexible structure allows it to be easily adapted and
appropriated. India’s interaction with jazz music has been facilitated not only
by analogous eastern elements but also by the presence of formal western
classical musical education, even though there were no formal schools that
afforded training to musicians in jazz and its advanced concepts. A lot of
contemporary jazz musicians, who constitute the third phase of jazz music in
India are essentially self-taught, who have learnt from records, cassettes, CDs
and from the internet. Sadly as jazz pianist Madhav Chari notes, due to this
lack of formal education in jazz music, the local jazz music scene is weak in
India because musicians who play jazz in contemporary India have little or no
understanding of jazz concepts and unlike the integrated approach taken by the
second phase of musicians, the third phase sounds more like an unsophisticated
imitation of the western sound rather than a home-grown product. That is not to
say that there aren’t good jazz musicians, but the number of proper jazz
musicians seems to have dwindled. While the demand for local jazz is
devastatingly low, the demand for international jazz acts has increased by
leaps and bounds with metropolitan cities such as Kolkata and Delhi organising
international jazz fests, promoting and sponsoring all kinds of jazz from the
likes of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter to the gypsy band Elkano Browning
Cream, and on the brighter side, it is increasing the interaction between
Indian music, contemporary Indian jazz and other forms of jazz music. The local
jazz scene may be weak, but it is developing and some of these musicians like
the Akash Mittal Quartet or the Srinjoy Banerjee Quartet have already found a
unique voice through these interactions with international jazz acts. The
contemporary jazz music scene in India as mentioned earlier is multifaceted.
Barely anything from the first phase of Indian jazz has survived, but the
musicians of the second phase are still working together and creating a
fantastic blend of the two worlds and their legacy is being carried forward
through the collaborative works of musicians such as guitarist Prasanna
Ramaswamy, the Mridangam player Umayalpuram Mali, with contemporary jazz
musicians such as bassist Victor Wooten, drummer Karina Colis and trumpeter
Natalie John. The third phase of musicians have diversified into more technical
genres such as progressive jazz metal, nu-jazz, jazz-funk, carnatic jazz and
the like, the sounds of which are being determined by developments in audio and
recording technology. The advent of instruments such as the fretless seven
string guitar has opened up a world of microtonal possibility which had
hitherto been impossible without a slide. L. Shankar’s double neck electric
violin which accommodated notes of the violin and the cello was another intriguing
innovation during the second phase. In fact, Frank Zappa’s had worked with
Shankar in one of his elaborate, complex and progressively orchestrated albums,
“Touch Me Here” and the sound of Shankar’s violin had driven the music. India
is intricately connected with the world of jazz and with the world of music and
has had an immense influence on the music of the late 20th century
and early 21st century, with the incorporation of its elements in
genres such as progressive rock and djent. One of the foremost ways in which it
has had such a great impact is through its interaction with jazz and classic
rock. India is a country where the bebop of Carlton Kitto survives and exists
alongside police brass band ensembles and the evolving sounds of new Indian
jazz. The future of jazz music in India seems promising. The establishment of
Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music, a school of jazz and contemporary music in Tamil
Nadu has been instrumental in shaping the voice of musicians such as guitarist
Srinjoy Banerjee, bassist Abhishek Dey and progressive jazz-metal drummer Manu
Krishnan. The advent of the electronically synthesised sounds (that may be
called ‘globalised’) has been able to bridge to a certain extent, the cultural
divide that analog music has previously faced. The platform afforded to
musicians by websites such as SoundCloud, Reverb Nation or MySpace has also
helped popularise different kinds of music around the world and monikers used
by musicians have afforded a certain degree of anonymity as to their cultural
identities. Rivu, a jazz rock/jazz metal guitarist is a home producer who
arranges everything from drums to bass to brass on music sequencers known as
digital audio workstations or DAWs using synthesisers and sample banks and
records his guitar parts over them. EDM producer Introvert ? employs jazz
harmonies and complements them with rhythmic djent guitar parts and dubstep
beats. Eighteen year old guitarist Rhythm Shaw, a jazz rock guitarist is making
amazing music already, playing around with advanced jazz concepts and
techniques along with beautifully crafted guitar tones. The Monkey in Me is
another band, the music of which incorporates a lot of characteristically jazz
chords and bass-lines, but is very soul and has a lot of electronic elements.
Acoustic jazz music is also slowly growing
with gypsy jazz bands such as The Red Staples or the newer works of blues
guitarist Soumyarya Mallick, who is slowly moving into jazz and has composed an
amazingly fresh ‘mystic jazz’ acoustic guitar piece titled “Menim Dostum” based
on the poetry of Rumi and his friendship with Shams (but one cannot miss the
influence of Tajdar Junaid’s guitar playing and arrangement on his
compositional style). Singer Isheeta Chakravarti who collaborates with EDM
fusion producer Mayookh Bhaumik is also the lead singer of Carlton Kitto’s
present set up and the influence of bebop is audible in the harmonies of the
Hindustani classical vocals of EDM tracks such as “Jaja” in which pizzicato
articulations on the sarangi imitates the sound of the muted trumpet and the
synthesised tabla imitates a fixed bass-line.
While the jazz scene looks very promising it
is still in a nascent phase of development and these are only a handful of
musicians. But with the expanding musical palette of the country, music can
take a lot of new directions and the advantage that India has is that it has a
rich heritage of its own indigenous music and the music of other peoples, which
also contributed to the development of indigenous music. The antecedents of
lute based instruments such as the sitar and the sarod and now possibly the
guitar can be traced back to Greece, which travelled through Persia to India.
Jazz in India (which has also used all these three instruments) is a colonial
as well as post colonial phenomenon with a lofty musical and cultural heritage.
All these wonderful developments in music have been possible solely through interaction,
assimilation and appropriation. Behind all forms of music in this country,
there is a rich and complex history of civilisation waiting to be unfolded.
[1]
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