The Life and Death of Jazz in India
Words by Sandeep Radhakrishnan
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The Life and Death of Jazz in India by Sandeep Radhakrishnan
An American sociologist reviewed 319 articles in print media from the year 1930, all of which attempted to offer a description of jazz. Upon inspection, the sociologist found the following to be the most commonly occurring perspectives - that jazz had the ability to affect ‘the listener’s control of overt behaviours’, invoke ‘psychological alterations’, and ‘changes in emotional states’. The phrase ‘jazz intoxication’ had found itself embedded into the public lexicon. The music itself was regarded as a symbol of modernity and the artists’ avant-garde approach had successfully enraptured listeners, wherever they had been.
By the time jazz had begun to receive such characterizations in the press, the first foxtrot had already been recorded on Indian shores. Depending on who you ask, the first live performance happened anytime between 1917 and 1922, most likely at the Grand Hotel in Calcutta. Over the next thirty years, jazz music would become the pre-eminent form of entertainment amongst the elites of Indian society, which at the time was composed of the British and other white Europeans along with certain members of India’s many royal families, a few industrialists, and any such Indians who the British found useful to patronize. This period is now considered one of the most significant in modern Indian music history.
The jazz genre, as we all know, is a product of the African-American experience. It is difficult to say when exactly the genre itself first came into being but we do know that it gained widespread popularity during the 1920s, a period aptly termed the ‘Jazz Age’. Yet, African-Americans had been performing in India long before the 20s. In fact, the earliest known performance by Black artists in India dates as far back as 1849. Minstrelsy, which was a precursor to vaudeville, was essentially a form of theatrical entertainment wherein either black performers or white performers in blackface would put on skits, dances, or musical acts that were a racist caricature of African-Americans. Minstrels began touring the world during the early half of the 19th century and eventually found their way to the subcontinent at the Raj’s pleasure. Historical evidence suggests that there were numerous performances in India until the late 1800s when the art form began to evolve into other forms of entertainment, with jazz perhaps being the most distinguished.
To understand this three-decade period between the 1920s and the 1950s, we first need to go back to the early days of the East India Company. Company rule began in India in 1757. Around this time, Spain, Portugal, and other European powers had begun colonizing regions all over the world. One of the policies enacted by the colonizers, in the belief that it would improve relations between the colonists and the colonized, was the encouragement of interracial marriages. The East India Company would pay a sum of 5 rupees to any mother who had given birth to an interracial child and these children were entitled to certain benefits, such as a British education, employment in the administrative service, and a career in the military. However, in 1776, the mulatto’s (mixed-race individuals with both white and black parents) revolted against their Spanish rulers which caused the British in India to rethink their policies. Resultantly, a series of three orders were issued between 1786 and 1795 which saw the reversal of the benefits offered to inter-racial children, discouraging any future relationships between Englishmen and Indian women. There was, however, one exception. While interracial children, or Anglo-Indians, were not allowed to join the military as soldiers, they were allowed to join the brass bands. Thus began an association with music which has come to be one of the main characteristics of the community even today.
The reason this is important to know is because of the role that Anglo-Indians would go on to play in the Indian jazz scene of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. At first, only foreign musicians were allowed to perform at the venues in Calcutta and Bombay. This was a time when the clubs and hotels would not let most Indians enter the venue, even as performers. They soon had no choice as the African-Americans who decided to stay in India in order to form orchestras and perform needed at least a few local musicians to join them. Only Anglo-Indians were really familiar with Western music and instruments and as such became natural recruitments. The two most famous and most influential Black jazz musicians in India at the time were Teddy Weatherford and Roy Butler, the former a dazzling pianist from Virginia who is said to have inspired the legendary Earl Hines (the first great jazz pianist) and the latter a saxophonist from Chicago, whose memoirs serve as the primary source of information for what would have otherwise been a lost period in music history.