Striking a Chord

ONE SUNDAY EVENING, you walk into a dimly lit bar, with brick walls and a chandelier made of trumpets. The band on stage, complete with a horn section, is playing jazz legend Chick Corea’s composition, ‘Spain’ (1985). Or their version of it, as is always the case with this improvisation-driven genre. There’s a piano solo that sounds uncannily familiar. And a saxophone solo that makes you shush your companion, so you can listen to it without distraction. What’s undeniable is the vibe among the musicians on stage: there’s constant communication, verbal and musical, a call and response among different instruments, all of which is decided in the moment. The song seems rehearsed but not quite so, because the band on stage has been put together that very evening. The song ends and its origin and composer are introduced to the audience. And you can’t help but feel that you’re hearing the song for the very first time. And therein lies the beauty of jazz.

Through the night other musicians take the stage for the Sunday Jazz Jam Session at The Piano Man Jazz Club, Delhi, under the watchful eye of jazz pianist Arjun Sagar Gupta, also its owner and CEO. For just one song every night, The Piano Man stops FnB services and requests its patrons to just pay attention to the music. A step that’s forcing the Indian audi­ence—that’s used to treating jazz as background music—to listen, and be respectful to the music and musicians on stage.

The concept of ‘The Silent Song’ was born out of frustra­tion two months after they opened shop in 2015, when Gupta observed people talking loudly during gigs. He doesn’t want live music to be accorded the same respect as elevator music. Instead, he wants listeners to respect it as they would a clas­sical music form. “The impact of the silent song is a psycho­logical one. It’s not about listeners taking five minutes out to listen, that’s the superficial engineered action. The intent is for people to understand the psychological and psychological impact of art. Can art influence my emotional state? Yes, it can, if you let it. And that’s the trick. Somebody becoming a little more attentive to music because of experiencing something beautiful in music is a win. That affinity will grow but it’s a slow process. It’s rare and unpredictable to like jazz overnight. Though there are such cases, because people haven’t heard it in the right way,” says Gupta, who started the club wishing to create a place where jazz lovers could congregate.

With Gupta at the helm, a handful of musicians across the country are building niche communities of listeners and performers around jazz. If there is Gupta in the capital, there is Pradyumna Singh Manot aka Paddy in Kolkata, Gino Banks in Mumbai and Karan Khosla in Goa. As musicians them­selves they provide both logistical and emotional support to younger musicians. As veterans they know that making a liv­ing from music is impossibly hard, but they wish to inculcate passion and rigour in younger artists. They want to remove jazz from its elite pedestal and to democratise it. They want the audience to appreciate evenings of pure and deep listening.

In Kolkata, Latin jazz pianist Paddy has taken listening to the next level. He has started The Monday Night Concerts at AMPM in Kolkata, which are one-hour concerts where people aren’t allowed to even whisper. Paddy, who has been organising music gigs at AMPM Kolkata since September 2023, admits that the weekly roster isn’t only focussed on jazz, but Sundays are reserved for jazz. Paddy says, “Jazz is always on my mind. We need more listeners in the city. In Kolkata there aren’t enough jazz musi­cians to revive the scene, unlike Delhi that is brimming with jazz musicians. Before 2020, there were just a handful of musicians in Delhi as well. But the con­stant jam sessions at The Piano Man Jazz Club have inspired young kids, which has pushed this scene. Another factor is that the last decade has seen parents who aren’t hell bent on the doctor or engineer life for their kid.”

Not that the genre needs an introduction in India. Jazz was already in hotels and ballrooms in the 1930s and ’40s thanks to the British who got the Indian ‘elite’ of that time listening to it. Travelling jazz musicians gave free lessons to Indian musicians, who later played for films and composers in India. Composers like C Ramchandra, Salil Chowdhury and RD Burman used jazz effectively in their music styles as well. Key figures in the indie scene included pianist Louis Banks, who started in Calcutta, and is known as the ‘godfather of Indian jazz’. Festivals like the Jazz Yatra, started in the late ’70s in Bombay, played a key role in bringing international names such as Sadao Watanabe, an iconic Japanese jazz musician, to India.

MUMBAI DRUMMER GINO Banks grew up listening to this first batch of these Indian jazz musicians— bassist Karl Peters, Goan saxophonist Braz Gonsalves and drummer Sivamani, besides Shankar Mahadevan—in the ’80s and ’90s, who were playing with his father Louis Banks. The way these musicians played and interacted fed into his subconscious and became his template. “My grandad played jazz on the trumpet and piano, which was the ‘popular’ music of his time. So, jazz is my family musical legacy,” says Banks, who was introduced to genres like metal, rock and hip-hop after jazz. Unlike most of us.

Exposure is key. Three days of The Jazz Yatra in a year wasn’t enough to sustain a subculture. So, nine years ago when Gupta opened his first jazz club in Delhi, he started to fill the gap with jazz-inclined gigs every night. “The availability and exposure of music to customers, patrons, listeners, will create either famil­iarity and love, or familiarity and contempt. But it will create an opinion. For which constant exposure is crucial,” he says.

It is venues like Gupta’s that Banks is relying on to give budding jazz musicians a platform. Younger musicians are embracing the jazz values of improvisational skills and techniques. Jazz also offers a way to learn music beyond the traditional Western approach, points out jazz guitarist Karan Khosla and founder of The Goa Jazz Academy. “Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, today’s youth approach jazz with much more enthusiasm and curiosity. Jazz stands out with its rich his­tory and complexity,” adds Khosla, who discovered jazz during his early twenties while working in the US. When he came back to India in 2006, he managed operations at an investment firm and then an education tech company till 2015, before he took to music full time. Khosla’s Goa Jazz Academy which he started in 2019, two years after moving to Goa, was a result of wanting to create a nurturing environment for aspiring musicians of all backgrounds. “Musicians today know that jazz is a fun and col­laborative way to learn the foundations of music,” he adds.

IN KOLKATA, PADDY is mentoring musicians like bassist Aditya Servaia and drummer Bihu Mukherjee in Latin jazz, wherein you swap the rhythm with Latino ones like Rumba or Samba. In Mumbai, Banks is connecting with young listeners and budding musicians with the monthly jazz nights he organises at Prithvi Theatre on the last Sunday morning every month. Now in its second year, it hosts performances by Mumbai jazz musicians, or those travelling to the city. “The point is to get the community together. We have a lot of parents walking in with their kids to Prithvi. Music schools and venues like Bonobo and Bluebop in Mumbai, and The Piano Man in Delhi-NCR are the reason why people are discovering jazz earlier today. So today we have 16-year-olds who love jazz. And musicians like Rhythm Shaw and Mohini Dey, who’re a decade younger than I, are playing at a really high level,” says Banks. The Sunday Jazz Jam Sessions at Delhi’s The Piano Man Jazz Club, has groomed a bunch of young jazz musicians: drum­mer Aditya Bhagavatula started attending the sessions when he was 14. Seven years later, he’s a sought-after jazz drummer. Nineteen-year-old saxophonist Agneya Singh is inspiring others to take up jazz. “When Rythem Bansal [a pianist from Delhi] plays the piano today, I wonder why I am even playing the piano,” Gupta admits proudly.

When they started, it was rare to have musicians of each instrument present, with Gupta filling in on the drums or bass. Today, there are about 30 musicians every Sunday, besides travelling artists.

India now has this niche ecosystem of a few jazz clubs, but there’s still a need for a lineage of artists. “When that happens regularly, we will have examples to show to our parents of a healthy, sustainable life built around music. Right now, musi­cians do it for maybe a decade and leave it, which is under­standable. But, some of us need to be the first Ben Webster so we can have a Charlie Parker in 15-20 years,” says saxophone player Abhay Sharma, who was introduced to jazz when he was 14 by his father. He’s doing his own bit of mentoring jazz musicians with his jazz funk band, The Revisit Project (formed in 2015). Jazz is still a niche art form in India, and that is why patronage and mentorship are essential. More opportunity is needed for younger musicians to play for live audiences. “We need 10 jazz clubs like the Piano Man so that there’s enough work for musicians and enough experiences for the crowd to try out,” says Sharma.

Meanwhile Gupta, who opened a third jazz club in Delhi- NCR last year and has since had the likes of Herbie Hancock and Jacob Collier perform at the new venue, is playing it smart. He’s not sticking to just jazz at his clubs, though 40 to 70 per cent of their calendar is dedicated to the jazz universe. “Our long-term goal has changed from just creating a community for jazz, to making attending live shows a lifestyle choice,” says Gupta. The Piano Man has done 8,000 shows till date. Proof that people are coming in and paying attention.

Gino BanksGoa Jazz Academyjazzmusicmusical tasteThe Piano Man Group