The Mumbai-based author and journalist Naresh Fernandes stumbled upon the idea for his latest book by accident, while investigating a long-forgotten scandal that had once gripped the city’s music scene. As titillating as this tale must have been, it ended up as nothing compared to a single chat with the veteran Indian musician Frank Fernand. In fact, one brief exchange with this ageing jazzman ended up sowing the seeds for an intricate, enchanting and truly original historical work.
The result of painstaking research and many more such conversations, Taj Mahal Foxtrot focuses on Bombay (now Mumbai) between the 1930s and the 1950s. At this point the city's social scene centred on the Taj Palace Hotel, populated by a cast of well-to-do Indians and louchely glamorous expatriates. Although the subcontinent was geographically distant from the western world and poles apart in terms of culture there existed one common theme. Just like London and New York, the freewheeling sound of big-band dance music echoed through the Taj's ballroom, providing the perfect soundtrack for a changing city buzzing with political, economic and artistic possibilities.
If early 20th-century Bombay sounds rather like the prevailing view of 21st-century India – thrustingly ambitious, brimming with potential and eager to take its place on the world stage – that is no coincidence. Fernandes delights in making such links. Most engaging of all is his astute and finely nuanced examination of the connection between jazz and the pursuit of freedom, both in the United States and its adopted Indian home. Given that the genre's cornerstone is a certain structural liberation, how could it not appeal to members of any group seeking personal and/or national empowerment?
Introducing a company of delightfully named artists – including the trumpeter Chic Chocolate and the saxophonist Johnny Baptist – Taj Mahal Foxtrot is essentially a loving homage to the massive contribution made by migrant Goan musicians to the city’s musical landscape. However, perhaps its most intriguing story is that of the first forays into India by black American artists – not to mention their own unlikely predecessors.
It is strange to consider that the dubious tradition of blackface minstrelsy should have been a particularly popular strand of entertainment in Bombay at any time. Yet certain chords of colonial relevance appear to have been struck by American performers such as Dave Carson in the mid 19th century. Reportedly, audiences comprising both Indians and Europeans adored him, and his act gradually evolved into a series of satires of “native life” that, according to one newspaper critic of the time, made “the Parsee laugh at his caricature of the Hindoo, while the Hindoo is convulsed by his clever skits on the Parsee”.
Fortunately, although African-American culture was introduced to the subcontinent in this uncomfortably mediated manner, by the time artists such as the violinist Leon Abbey and his band arrived in Bombay in 1935 the city was ready for the real thing. Their performances went down a storm, influencing a generation of bandleaders and musicians and, as Fernandes notes, discrimination was rare. Still, the fact that Bombay offered a better experience than Jim Crow-era America is presented as only natural. After all, it is often stated that The Taj Palace, where Abbey’s band enjoyed a residency, was founded as a brilliantly ostentatious reaction to colonial prejudice. Legend has it that the industrialist Jamsetji Tata set about building the institution after being refused entry to the stuffy, racially segregated Pyrkes Apollo Hotel in the early 1900s. Regardless of how apocryphal this story may be, Fernandes explains that Tata made his views on matters of race exceedingly clear to his guests, writing that “he later hung a notice in the lobby forbidding entry to South Africans and dogs”.
This spirit of openness and the significance of big-band music in India are both convincingly explained. For a start, a compelling dialogue existed between India and black America throughout the interwar years – a number of prominent US-based thinkers and publications had been busy exploring the ways in which Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, could be employed in their own fight against racism. Given that both were port cities with a history of European colonisation and have acted as staging posts in separate struggles for freedom, it is also possible to draw certain parallels between Bombay and New Orleans – the very birthplace of.
Still, that's not to say that racial bias didn't come into play on the Bombay social scene. It did – even in the rarefied world of the city's jazz bands. Fernandes illustrates the complexity of these dynamics in a fascinating section concentrating on the Anglo-Indian musician Ken Mac. Abbey, a former member of the Dixieland Jazz Band and an associate of Louis Armstrong, led the city's first "all-negro" ensemble. Mac "on the other hand established his reputation as 'the pioneer of the European dance band'". In an environment mainly populated by dark-skinned Goans and a smattering of newly imported African-American players, "Mac was the bandleader of choice at such whites-only establishments as the Bombay Gymkhana and the Royal Bombay Yacht Club".
Another remarkable similarity between the nascent Indian jazz scene and its American progenitor is, according to Fernandes, to be found in its evolution: the vital role played by religious organisations in the nurturing and training of young musicians who would later go on to carve out careers in the secular arena. Instead of the nonconformist protestant chapels of the US, though, a large proportion of Bombay’s jazz musicians, and especially those of Goan heritage, got their start in musical groups associated with the Roman Catholic church.
It is rather surprising to find that the impact of Indian traditional music on swing bands was limited, especially as it would later become an indelible influence on figures such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis. However, inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru's book Discovery of India and a 1946 meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Fernand began to seek out ways to create an original, subcontinental iteration of the style. How successful this vision was remains open to question. Apparently the majority of Goan musicians, coming as they did from a place occupied by the Portuguese, identified less with the Gandhian struggle to end British occupation than many other Indians. Some even viewed Fernand's ideas as pretentious and silly.
In what appears to be a gentle validation of Fernand's efforts, two events are highlighted. Firstly, Fernandes draws upon the 1947 proclamation of Indian independence as experienced by the clientele of the Taj: the writer and man about town Dosoo Karaka delivering a rousing address to the assembled crowd and the band closing the night with Jana Gana Mana (a song that would soon become the Indian national anthem). Next, he refers to a 1948 performance at the Taj in which an original piece by Fernand was played. A highlight of the night, "it featured a haunting trumpet solo, with orchestral accompaniment ... described on the programme as being an 'Indian theme'. Fernand's meeting with Gandhi, it seems, had finally borne fruit."
Fernandes then goes on to explain that by the 1950s big-band jazz had established itself at the heart of Indian popular culture: the movie studios of Bombay. Then, as it remains, the driving motor of popular music in the nation, the film industry embraced the sound in a curiously contradictory manner. Previously the preserve of a largely upper-crust audience, the genre rapidly became a signifier of both upward mobility and moral decline. As outlined in vivid descriptions of cabaret scenes filled with scantily clad vamps, unbridled dancing, smoking and whisky drinking, it was often “used disapprovingly, to remind audiences of the perils of forgetting India’s ancient culture in the face of creeping westernisation”.
Armed with this knowledge, it is tempting to trace the legacy of musicians such as Chic Chocolate and Frank Fernand – both of whom eventually found homes in Bollywood – to contemporary Indian pop. For instance, Kolaveri Di is a sublimely daft lamentation of romantic failure that has been audible more or less all day, everywhere, for the past three months. Delivered in a laconic drawl by the actor Dhanush and taken from the forthcoming Tamil film 3, this saxophone-laced song’s debt to jazz is plain. What’s more, its subject matter also refers to all the tropes of dissolution recognised by Fernandes in Bombay cinema of 60 years ago.
Of course, that’s probably a bit of a reach, but it seems like the kind of thing Fernandes might appreciate. In many ways, Taj Mahal Foxtrot is that most rare of books: an authoritative account of a hitherto unknown history. As such it would be enthralling had it relied simply on the wealth of information it uncovers. Like the very best music writing, though, it offers much more. Evoking time, place and a whole host of personalities, it creates a genuinely captivating narrative. More than anything else, the prose moves with the rhythm of its subject, pushing boundaries, making breathless associations and swinging like the hottest band in town.
Dave Stelfox’s work has been published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Village Voice.