Jazz in India

Template:Jazzbox In India, jazz was probably first performed regularly in the metropoles Calcutta and Bombay around the late 1920s.

Overview

The era from the 1930s to the 1950s is often called as the golden age of jazz in India. It began with jazz musicians like Leon Abbey, Cricket Smith, Creighton Thompson, Ken Mac, Roy Butler, Teddy Weatherford (who recorded with Louis Armstrong), and Rudy Jackson who toured India to avoid the racial discrimination they faced in the USA. The ballrooms of five-star hotels and in the nightclubs of major Indian cities were jazz centres. As nationalism swept the country, these venues became the refuge of the European and Indian elite, the aristocrats, the moneyed and the public servants. During this period, musicians such as Chic Chocolate, Frank Fernand, Micky Correa, Rudy Cotton, Hal and Henry Green, Josic Menzie, Pamela McCarthy, and Chris Perry were at the forefront of the burgeoning jazz scene in Bombay, the nerve center of which was at the Taj Mahal hotel ballroom. These musicians often played at five-star hotels, but they were regulars at the second level, at the Ambassador Starlight Roof Gardens, the Bristol Grill, the Dadar Catholic Institute, the Greens Hotel, the Ritz Roof Garden, the West End Hotel Roof Garden and the YMCA. Many of these musicians were Goans, because Goans learnt western music under Portuguese rule. Most of the Goan jazz musicians also worked in the Bollywood film industry and were responsible for the introduction of genres like jazz and swing to Hindi film music. Interestingly, though jazz in India began as an entertainment for the elite, it made its way to the working class and into Hindi films. Frank Fernand and Anthony Gonsalves not only infused the sound of western music into Bollywood, but were also filled with India's new-found nationalism and developed an authentic foundation to link the world of jazz with that of Indian classical music. The jazz fraternity was also a melting pot of people of different communities because there were Goans, Anglo-Indians and people from other communities like Rudy Cotton who was a Parsi.

Today, some the centres of Jazz in India are Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Goa. There is a following for jazz in Goa and a jazz festival was held in Goa in 2012. In Homi Bhabha Hall Mumbai and kamani Hall Delhi Zila Khan has sung Jazz and Arabic songs in the Jazz style.

Indo jazz

See also: Indo jazz and Sitar in jazz

Jazz and Indian classical music share some similarities, one of them being that they both involve improvisation. Musicians realised this and collaborations between Indian classical musicians and Western jazz musicians which had commenced in the 1940s led to the development of a new genre of music called Indo Jazz consisting of jazz, classical and Indian influences. Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane and John Mayer were some of the pioneers of the fusion of jazz and Indian music. Conversely, Indian classical music has also had a significant impact on the genre of jazz music.

External links

• BBC audio slideshow about the jazz age in Bombay and Chic Chocolate

Jazz Bands in Goa