The excellent folks at Free School Street Records have reissued Explorations, the album recorded at Calcutta Kala Mandir in 1978 featuring Braz Gonsalves, Louis Banks and Pam Crain. It’s a limited, 250-copy edition. You can get it here. I was delighted to have written these liner notes for the new vinyl release:
India has long danced to its own drummer and anyone seeking evidence of this simply has to rewind to 1978.
If you are to believe jazz purists, the 1970s were the bleakest time for the genre. The geniuses who had given jazz its creative energy in the previous decades had become content with ploughing the same old grooves – or were dead. The classical jazz revival that was to be sparked by Wynton Marsalis was still a few years in the future. It was, the nostalgists claim, the lost decade.
But the pre-internet world failed to deliver the message to India. In the peninsula between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, jazz musicians and promoters continued to dream of breaking on to new frontiers.
That became obvious in February 1978, when a stellar cast of musicians from around the world converged on the Rang Bhavan amphitheater in Bombay to perform at a festival whose very name made it clear the destination wasn’t as important as the adventures that could be had on the way there.
The tagline on the smudgy cover of the programme of the Jazz Yatra – the Journey of Jazz – declared that the gargantuan ambition of the event. It was to be a “festival of Indo-Afro-American music”. Over the next three decades, the biennial Jazz Yatras would reiterate how significantly the genre had been influenced by the sounds of the subcontinent – and suggest techniques and approaches that could be used to move on down the road.
This endeavour was articulated explicitly in a Yatra programme booklet. By the 1950s, said an essay by the German jazz critic Joachim-Ernest Berendt, jazz musicians realised that there was “something colonialistic in their exclusive preoccupation with European music as though it were the only worthwhile music in the world” and began to seek out encounters with “other musical cultures and musicians from all over the world.”.
Their quest, Berendt noted, was animated by a new political awareness. He explained: “The discovery of world music and for that matter world culture by jazz musicians is one of the most important cultural aspects of Third World solidarity.”
Where once such encounters had occurred almost exclusively in the metropolitan centres of the United States and Europe, the sites for a variety of new collaborations were now Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. The Jazz Yatras helped shift the ground – literally – on which musicians were exchanging ideas, advancing, in some small measure, the contention that India could help catalyse new conversations in jazz.
At the inaugural edition of the Yatra, holding its own amidst the glittering cast of international stars, was a homegrown outfit assembled especially for the occasion. The Jazz-India Ensemble was a sextet led by the country’s most innovative jazz musicians: keyboard player Louis Banks and saxophonist Braz Gonsalves.
The same year, these two musicians joined with the vocalist Pam Crain to headline a concert in Calcutta’s Kala Mandir auditorium that demonstrated that Berendt’s observations weren’t merely high-minded theory: they were also the roadmap for a joyful jazz odyssey.
In a stroke of fortune, the Gramophone Company of India decided to record the concert and release it as an album – making this the first Indian jazz concert LP to ever hit the shelves.
The title of the album, Explorations, reflected the philosophy that also underpinned the Yatras. “From its inception, [jazz] has been a music of constant search and change,” said the liner notes. “At no point will a jazzman say, ‘I’ve arrived. This is the best sound ever.”
More than four decades after the album’s release, as Louis Banks listened to the tracks again one monsoon evening, he confessed that he didn’t remember much about the concert. He recalled looking out on the audience seated on the rising tiers of the plush auditorium as he played the Roland synthesizer that he’d acquired through his sister, an air hostess who travelled abroad frequently.
His most vivid memory was of performing with a band bursting with talent – the “best outfit I’ve ever played with”, Banks said.
Most of the performers at the Kala Mandir concert were members of the Louis Banks Brotherhood, the house band at the Blue Fox nightspot on Calcutta’s coruscating Park Street. Playing together night after sweaty night had moulded the Brotherhood into India’s tightest jazz outfit. Perhaps it isn’t whimsical to imagine that Banks wrote the first track of the album as a tribute to his bandmates: it’s called Funky Brothers.
Adding to their firepower were two percussionists playing Indian instruments: Ramesh Shottam on thavil and Sunil Banerjee on table.
The set list reflects the headliners’ preoccupations at the time. Banks was drawn to the jazz-fusion stylings of Chick Correa’s Return to Forever and Herbie Hancock’s The Headhunters. On the standards and the originals on the album, you hear the keyboardist pay homage to his heroes – and pour himself into the task of shattering their maquettes to create his own sonic sculptures.
Though the originals are credited to Banks, the Indian rhythmic patterns that determine the structures of some tunes make it clear that Gonsalves was an essential co-creator. By 1978, the saxophonist had spent long years studying raag theory and trying to apply it to jazz composition and improvisation.
If there’s a sense that the performers are feeling their way through uncharted territory, that’s exactly why Explorations is so significant. The ideas being worked through here are buds that would burst gloriously into bloom five years later, when Banks and Gonsalves went into the studio in Germany to record an album that would come to be titled Sangam.
That collaboration, featuring the Carnatic vocalist Rama Mani, also had its origins at the Jazz Yatra. The brainchild of festival organiser Niranjan Jhaveri, the Jazz Yatra Sextet made their debut at the 1980 edition of the event, before going on the road in Europe. Sangam by the Jazz Yatra Sextet (released in India as City Life by Louis Banks’ Sangam) is one of the funkiest pieces of Indo-jazz fusion ever put down on wax and remains a milestone for the genre.
Of course, that’s exactly how Explorations saw itself – as a stepping stone. As the liner notes concluded, “This album…is definitely going to be a landmark in the progress of integration of Indian and Western cultures – both powerful and influencing.”
