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.