7.30 pm, Sunday, 10th February. 
Back to Mumbai
After two successful shows down south, JAZZ once again returns to Mumbai. The play, which continues to enthrall its audience, was recently performed at St. Andrew's Auditorium, Mumbai, on Sunday, 23rd December 2007. With a total of six shows under its belt the play now moves into the New Year with a lot more shows scheduled.
The Journey so far......
JAZZ opened to a full house on 6th November 2007 as a part of Prithvi's ongoing Musical Theatre Festival. The response from the audience was not only encouraging but overwhelming.
Penned by Ramu Ramanathan, the play is based on research by Naresh Fernandes.
"I have been interested in this story almost all my life and especially since Jerry Pinto and I worked on the anthology, Bombay, Meri Jaan," says Fernandes. "It's also the story of Goan migration to Bombay."
Along with the play was born Denzil Smith's 'Stagesmith Productions', under whose banner the play continues to flourish. With a hope to make the JAZZ journey wholesome, Denzil Smith along with Naresh Fernandes, set out on a quest to document Mumbai's acquaintance with jazz.
What began as research for a play...
ended up as material for an exhibition, Jazz - The Bombay Connection, which previewed at Zenzi on 15th November 2007.
The collection of photographs, sourced from family albums, flyers and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower archives, points towards Mumbai as the epicenter of the migrated and traveling musicians. The collated pictures throw up names of some noted musicians—Mickey Correa, Chic Chocolate, Anthony Gonsalves, Lucila and George Pacheco— who created and sustained
Bombay's jazz era from the 1930s until the 1960s.
After the two premier shows at the Prithvi Festival, JAZZ played for the Celebrate Bandra Festival on November 27 th, 2007. As mumbaitheatreguide.com notes:
"It was a day to remember as the play started an hour late due to a power failure in the city. However, it must have been the magic of the Jazz era - that the audience waited.
The show ran to a full house which had the who's who of Mumbai's theatre and music world."
Away from home turf...
JAZZ was very well received in Bangalore and Chennai, where it was invited for the Bangalore Habba Festival and The Park Festival respectively. Standing ovations and repeated cries of 'ENCORE!!' only added to our confidence.
The play now navigates a long journey hoping to relive the spirit of Jazz with our gracious audiences.
As Etienne Coutinho, Director of JAZZ notes,
"This is a story that was waiting to be told, lying buried under the colossal commercial Behemoth called Bollywood. In this provocative context, the story of JAZZ funnels the lives and times of a group of musicians into one man.
For me, directing the play has been a journey of discovery - distilling out the essence - so that what is left is the spirit and truth. I enjoyed the experience. Hope you do too."
The play is being performed on the 3rd & 4th Jan at Prithvi Theatre (6:00pm & 9:00pm on both days.) For further enquiries, contact: Akanksha Gupta at 9820581863.
Within two decades of jazz taking shape in the melting-pot city of New Orleans, it found a home thousands of miles away in a city that also prided itself of mixing up cultures and serving them up with a new twist: Bombay. The city first heard jazz on phonograph records but by the mid-1930s, a string of American bands was playing in Bombay. They included outfits led by Leon Abbey, a dapper violinist from Minnesota, cornet player Crickett Smith and the pianist Teddy Weatherford. Smith and Weatherford soon inducted Indians into their bands, leaving the city a syncopated legacy that still lives on.
In 1949, a Bombay Swing Club brochure listed more than 60 jazz bands, starting from the Alexandra Band led by C de Noronha to the Zoroastrian Symphonyans. The list includes outfits headed by such legends as trumpet players Chic Chocolate and Frank Fernand, saxophonists Micky Correa and Hecky Kingdom and pianists Lucila Pacheco and Mike Machado. Many of the city's jazz musicians played a vital part in creating Hindi film music. These musicians formed the bulk of the orchestras that played the music, and some – like Chic Chocolate, Fernand and the violinist Anthony Gonsalves – worked as arrangers, or assistant music directors as they're listed in the credits.
Typically, the producer would organise a 'sitting' at which the composer (most often a Hindu), the lyricist (usually an Urdu-speaking Muslim) and the arranger would flop down on comfortable cushions to listen to the director narrate the plot. When the director indicated the point at which a song was necessary, the composer would hum out a melody or pick it out on his harmonium. It was the arranger's task to note down these fragments, which the composer would later piece together into an entire song.
But even then, the composer would craft only the verse and the chorus. The arranger was responsible for fashioning the melodic bridges, for shaping the parts for individual instruments and often even wrote the background music. The arranger wasn't merely a secretary. The Goans drew on their bicultural heritage to give Bollywood music its promiscuous charm, slipping in slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese fados, Ellingtonesque doodles, cha cha cha, Mozart and Bach themes. Long before fusion music became fashionable, it was being performed every day in Bombay's film studios.
Naresh Fernandes
