SINGING AT THE BOMBAY JAZZ FESTIVAL.
Bombay seems an unlikely city to attend an International Jazz Festival. Indian music – that lifeblood of "Bollywood", the busiest film industry in the world - is clearly predominant and increasingly carries messages of national pride. The latest hit song from the latest movie attracts a response from the Indian public that is curiously reminiscent of the fever surrounding Sinatra in the bobby sox era. Indians love their music with a passion - and while they may have an ear to Western stars,( yes Michael Jackson has played Bombay ) – their own songs are what they like best. These days the sinewy slides of these undulating melodies may well be accompanied by a techno-funk beat; but it is unmistakably Indian.
So the invitation extended for me to perform at the Jazz Yatra festival in Bombay in early November last year certainly aroused my curiosity. On a previous trip to Bombay I had heard about the Jazz Festival there, but all my attempts to find out about it drew a blank. It isn’t easy to find out about performances of anything much in Bombay; you hope you will simply stumble across these things, and frequently you do. The city is so incredibly crowded that to even find the office where you might get such information could take days. And people’s desire to help means that they’d prefer to give wrong directions than to send you away with nothing! The internet changed all this for me - with the email address of the Secretary General of Jazz Yatra ( the Indian’s love of titles is a hangover from the British Raj days ) and from the comfort of my home office I made contact and one thing led to another. I sent some recordings, which thankfully arrived ( it ain’t necessarily so! ) and before I knew it my photograph was in the programme as the one of the main acts of the Festival.
Just to be met at Bombay airport is like an answer to prayer. The sudden shock of the hot night air coupled with the throng of cabbies and rickshaw wallahs lining the barricades outside the main entrance is daunting. The smiling man with my name on a card deftly escorted my wife and I through the crowd to his jeep and we were off into the dark night to our hotel. The darkness is something of a relief arriving in Bombay for it partly obscures the tumble of shacks that line the route from the airport. More people sleep under bits of cardboard and plastic than live in the city of Christchurch. You can smell it too. We are booked in at the West End Hotel – in the same street as the Bombay Hospital.(Small comfort on arriving in a city where every second traveller has a story about getting sick in India.) But the street is busier than a month of Christmas’ eves in Queen St and I am filled with the excitement of being back in one of the most extraordinary cities in the world.
That Bombay functions at all rather than disintegrating into chaos and anarchy seems a miracle. This fact alone gives a feeling of exhilaration.
The West End Hotel is like some relic of London’s famous theatre district. The sort of place James Mason might have stayed in the 50’s. Charmingly faded theatrical elegance, dusty velvet drapes, crisp starched table cloths, silver tea-pots, and white coated waiters. Our concern on being startled by a rat scuttling along the marble corridor one evening was all but allayed by the gentle head-wagging of the porter who assured us that it couldn’t get into the room. Alas no theatre cat ( eaten perhaps ?). However the sheets on the bed were blue-bag white and we were comfortable enough to turn the air-conditioning off and open a window onto the sultry night air and sleep under the whirring of the ancient ceiling fan. Outside on a roof below people slept in the warm night.
We hung around the hotel for a day or two trying in vain to make contact with the Festival organisers. Musical instrument cases stacked in the lobby awaited transportation, and musicians from various parts of the world came and went. In conversation with them I was able to piece together some idea of what was going on. From previous visits to India I knew it was pointless to panic and with my years in jazz knew that "it’d be alright on the night"
By the time I found out that I was to perform the following evening it was too late to worry. Not travelling with my own accompanying musicians meant I was at the mercy of a makeshift band. This can either be triumph or disaster, with triumph’s tending to be less frequent. Talking with some musicians from Perth I was confident of a musical rapport. Their saxophone player, Jamie Oehlers was known to me by reputation and I had heard good reports of the concert they had a couple of nights earlier. I like Australians. They say what they mean - and I liked them even more when without fuss they agreed to play for me. I’d brought some music with me and the next day we talked over my programme. Half an hour’s sound check was all we could have. But experience has shown me that there are only two kinds of musicians – "them that can and them that can’t" ( We all know now - the latter teach - polytechnics are full of them and no amount of rehearsing will ever bring them up to scratch.) I was immensely relieved the musicians from Perth were skilled, schooled and confident. I knew we’d have fun! But who was I to sing to? Was there a taste for Gershwin & Cole Porter here ?
The growth of Indian middle class has coincided with the rapid changes in India’s economy as it hurtles toward the technological age. Extremes are part of Indian life. Poverty is ever present, but the flip side of this is the vast wealth that also exists. There are more millionaires in India than anywhere in the world, mostly inherited wealth dating back centuries to the maharajas and before, but now new fortunes are being created from diverse industries such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, polyester and more recently the IT technology, as India is thrust headlong into the 21st century. Much of this new wealth is concentrated in Mumbai ( as Bombay is now called ). With some of the highest real estate prices in the world little wonder that there is a growing taste for the finer offerings of Western culture. Decadence too. Everything is for sale in Bombay : night & day!
The Bombay Jazz Festival has been running since 1978. It’s audience tends to be middle class intellectuals, widely traveled, widely read, well educated, and well-off. Their apartments rival the upper east side apartments of Manhattan for art treasures and antiquities and invariably several languages pepper the conversation of these salons. The prime mover of the festival, Niranjan Jahveri, comes from three generations of diamond merchants after whom the biggest jewelry bazaar in Mumbai is named, the Jahveri Bazaar. In his spacious apartment in Bombay’s ritziest suburb he has entertained some of the most illustrious names in jazz including Stan Getz , Stephane Grappelly Sonny Rollins. ( and Me )
Most of the jazz I heard at this years bi annual Festival was relentlessly avante garde. Not your easy listening and familiar foot tapping tunes, but hard, and raw and uncompromising. The best of it was new and exciting, the worst, cacophonous and long-winded. As one of the Australian musicians said succinctly, long on tension, short on release!
The musicians were predominantly American groups – travelling in India with help from the National Endowment of the arts. Even the Aussis were there on an arts grant! The American virtuoso clarinet player Eddie Daniels was performing. –a lyrical latter day Artie Shaw. (New Zealand didn’t even know I was there! )
The mostly Indian audience, colourful in their bright silks and light fabrics, would happily sit through many long hours of difficult music with benign composure – Perhaps early years spent listening to endless ragas develop patience and courtesy unknown in the West. And there’s a fundamental philosophic difference that at times can make India so exasperating for the Westerner – an acceptance of the immutable law of impermanence . Everything changes and everything stays the same. In India one learns to confront decay. The decay of a building , the decay of a corpse, the decay of a note played on the sitar.
It’s impossible to imagine a western audience accepting such difficult music. But then India has a remarkable rich tradition of poetry and music that extends back hundreds of years. It is as melodically rich and rhythmically complex as India’s architecture and infinitely varied decorative arts.
I recall on a previous visit to India one New Years eve a Television programme with Zubin Mehta conducting the Israeli Philharmonic. The programme was for some extraordinary reason Johan Strauss’ polkas – and I wondered at the time what the Indians must have made of it. This late 19th C western music seemed so knee-slappingly unsubtle and gross in comparison the infinite subtleties of Indian music. Over time one begins to see why jazz appeals in India. Both classical Indian music and jazz incorporate improvisations on set themes – both are dependent upon strong and complex rhythm drive and both disciplines require a highly developed level of spontaneous interplay between the performers. This music demands an active involvement from its listener. Not something that comes easily to Western audiences these days, where the circus spectacle of the Three Tenors belting out yet another million dollar Nessun Dorma has replaced the refined recital in pulling power. And as for pulling power, Jazz has always been pretty marginal ; ( as one of my musicians friends rightly suggests – "if they don’t want to come and hear us there’s nothing we can do to stop them". )
The performance venue was a spacious outdoor amphitheater, the Rang Bhavan, Seating some 1500 people it was well known and an easy enough walk from our Hotel in the pleasant warm November evening. Dodging the traffic and the eternal line of beggars takes skill – keeping clean in the thick brown fug of kerosene laced petrol fumes is impossible.
I performed on the Saturday evening of the 4 day festival. Sunday was closing night so I figured I had been awarded a top spot which was gratifying. It’s wonderful being well received in a country where no-one knows you. Like winning a secret prize in compensation for neglect one lives with at home. There’s the added thrill of making music with good musicians whom you have only just met. Like a great conversation. My songs were enjoyed and afterwards I autographed the few CD’s I’d brought to refreshingly keen admirers. It was nice lingering in the easy evening temperatures. Balmy evenings are a luxury to a South Island New Zealander. Some New Zealand visitors who had heard about the concert from their Indian friends had made it along. Lovely to be garlanded in the presence of one’s countrymen. I felt proud.
We went back to a very chic little club by the Bay – a watering hole where the Beautiful people of Bombay like to hang out after hours. This was the most western club I’d been in India, as loud and smokey as anything in Sydney or New York – the only differences perhaps the flash and fire of very costly jewelry. (No- one much wears the real thing in New York these days – too risky – and even Mrs. Simpson wore Paste! ) The age mix unaccustomedly wide. Young women with the shiniest hair and perfect teeth, smiles brighter than the diamond belt buckles on their Gloria Vanderbilt jeans- rubbing shoulder’s with perfectly groomed women of uncertain age – but all in Western dress. The men, handsome and aqualine. Calm with privilege. The young woman I spoke with worked in Bollywood as a makeup artist. She had lived and trained in the US and now had her own team of makeup artists. She never stayed for the summers. The older woman in the finest silk sari was a famous singer from Calcutta, all eyes and teeth.
Always performing.
But suddenly at the pumpkin hour the metal grill on the bar rolled down and we were all rather unceremoniously shunted out. Tough new anti alcohol laws were being introduced in the attempt to combat growing city crime. Bars and night-clubs were increasingly facing curfews; On one hand the Mafia Dons were notorious for their unabashed demands of protection money from the clubs and on the other the politicians were desperately anxious to distance themselves from the growing tales of corruption and complicity with the Mafia bosses. Everybody spoke of it as a sham.
My hosts - deeply embarrassed. Yet something more than embarrassment lay just beneath the surface. They were unnerved. Conversations were resumed in Hindi –voices were raised anxiously. The pitch level went up, like a luxury liner rolling on a sudden high sea. Only recently a famous film director had been kidnapped and found murdered. Prominent business men and intellectuals received death threats. Shiv Sena – the increasingly powerful Hindu fundamentalists in coalition with the notoriously corrupt BJP party, was targeting liberal ideas and stirring up dissent amongst the dispossessed classes of Mumbai. Fiercely anti-intellectual and anti-Muslim it was turning it’s back on the years of Hindu tolerance and creating an uneasy climate of dissent and fear. Gandhi a ghost of the past. The cinema – the mirror of contemporary Indian society had become a major target; more recently this mirror had become a bit steamed up - and a cinema was prevented from showing a film that Shiv Sena disagreed with on moral grounds. The technique was simple and effective – thuggery!
I was glad to leave the nightclub, tired of the noise and the smoke. Away from an anxiety I did not have to live with.
But we made some new friends that night. Music draws people together across cultures and a night or two after the festival was over we went to our friends apartment in a suburb an hour away from the centre of Bombay. Rather than subject us to what they knew to be the horrors of rush hour suburban trains, our friends insisted we take a taxi. The apartment was near the sea and had been the family home for two generations. Because of this long tenure it was still affordable to my friends, a husband and wife and their three children. Even with his good job in the travel industry and her job as a secondary school teacher it would have been impossible for them at current market prices. To lose one’s footing on the economic ladder; illness, the sudden loss of a good job could mean ruin with it’s dire consequences of poverty, homelessness, squalor. One could sense the terrifying drop to the abyss below this illusion of middle class comfort. The huge anxiety that many face is Bombay is outside anything I know about.
Beautiful food was served . A lot of trouble had been taken, and the delicious food would have been costly. They drank Indian Bourbon. I drank bottled water. After dinner we sauntered down to the nearby beach and enjoying the easy temperature. The conversation was as warm and open as the night itself. It was the night of the comets and for an hour or more we were entertained by a dazzling display of terrestrial fireworks - meteors and comets skimming across the sky. Nature’s exhilarating chaos in action. A metaphor for Mumbai itself.