MUMBAI
Recording history
Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar is an indispensable source for India’s jazz fanatics
NARESH FERNANDES
Editor of Time Out Mumbai, Naresh is currently working on a pictorial history of Indian jazz
If the hubcaps should be stolen off your car before dawn breaks across Mumbai, you’ll be able to buy them back, freshly painted and gleaming, on the ribbon-like streets of Chor Bazaar – Thieves Market – before noon. At least, that’s what Mumbai legend maintains. There’s no guessing what you could unearth in the cluttered kiosks here, amid the piles of tatty porcelain vases, paintbrushes without any bristles and old film posters. But for Suresh Chandvankar, the unpredictability is the very point of it. He’s among India’s most fanatical record collectors and, in a country that’s careless about its past, Chor Bazaar is the closest thing he’s found to the British Library’s Sound Archives.
Fifteen years after the Edison Phonograph Company was founded in 1887 in the US to market a talking machine, a young American named Fred Gaisberg arrived in India on an expedition to record “native tunes” for the Gramophone Company in London. On 11 November 1902, a 30-year-old dancing girl who was part-Jewish and part-Armenian swept into the Calcutta hotel in which Gaisberg had set up his equipment to sing the traditional Raga Bhairavi. At the end of the tune, she announced: “My name is Gauhar Jan.” She was the first Indian classical musician to have her voice carved into the spiral grooves of a record.
That disc is among the treasures that Suresh Chandvankar has rescued from the oblivion of the flea market and posted on an internet site. A researcher at the prestigious Tata Institute of Fundamental Sciences by day, he runs the Society of Indian Record Collectors in his spare time. He’s stockpiled so many records over the years, he’s had to buy a second flat in a distant suburb to store them.
As a journalist who writes about music, I contacted Chandvankar five years ago on a whim. I was researching the history of jazz in India and wanted to know if any recordings existed. Because of its colonial past, India was treated to jazz performances as early as 1919. By the mid-1930s, American jazz bands were performing regularly in such luxury hotels as the Taj in Mumbai and the Grand in Calcutta. These musicians – a pianist Teddy Weatherford and a cornet player named Cricket Smith among them – recruited Indian sidemen and were the progenitors of a tradition that is still swinging (though with increasingly less vigour, alas).
Chandvankar emailed me a list of recordings of Western music recorded in India and I gasped. Though they’ve been long forgotten, it turns out that hundreds of dance and swing tunes were recorded in the sub-continent starting from the late 1920s. But because the companies that manufactured the records folded decades ago and because the ones that are still in business have sold their moulds for scrap, the only way to listen to these old 78 shellac records is to hope you’ll find one in a dusty corner of a junk shop.
I’ve now become a Chor Market devotee and the earliest Indian “hot music” recording I’ve found dates back to 1929 – it’s Lequime’s Grand Hotel Orchestra belting out a tune called Soho Blues. Last November, a local playwright named Ramu Ramanathan grew so intrigued by my quest, he decided to use the stories I’d dredged up as the basis for a stage production. Jazz has done more than 20 shows across India and plays at a festival in Amsterdam at the end of the year. I’m hoping to go along for the ride. I’ve been told that Amsterdam’s flea markets afford all kinds of surprises. And even if I don’t find that Teddy Weatherford recording of Thank Your Lucky Stars from 1944 that I really want, perhaps I’ll find a nice set of hubcaps.
|
