Love and longing in Mumbai’s Jazz Age (Part 1 of 3 Parts) by Naresh Fernandes - MansWorld magazine July 2003
For over five decades, well into the late 1960s before prohibition, taxation and rock-and-roll killed it, Mumbai boasted of one of the most vibrant jazz scenes in the world, outside of the US. On Churchgate Street, stretching from the Marine Drive sea front all the way up to Flora Fountain the sound of jazz spilled out through the doors of packed night clubs like Ambassador, Napoli, The Talk of the Town, Gaylord’s, Ritz, Little Hut, Bistro and Volga. Not to speak of the Rendezvous at the Taj. The legendary pianist and composer Dave Brubeck was impressed enough by the local musicians to attempt to make some recordings during one of his visits. Set against this backdrop is the tragic love affair of tenor saxophonist and band leader Chris Perry and singer Lorna Cordeiro. Naresh Fernandes tells their story for the first time.
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Their eyes give it away. Chris Perry wears a slick black jacket, the sleeves of his crisp white shirt revealing the glint of dark cuff links. His fingers clasp a gleaming tenor saxophone with a lover’s gentleness. Arms crossed coquettishly above her waist, Lorna Cordeiro is chic in a bouffant and a form-fitting gown that shows a flash of ankle. They stare into each other’s eyes, mesmerised. Behind them looms a giant camera aperture borrowed from the opening sequence of the Bond films.
You couldn’t miss the poster as you sauntered down Jamshetji Tata Road in downtown Bombay. It hung outside the Astoria Hotel, across the street from the octagonal Art Deco turret of Eros cinema, inviting the city to Chris and Lorna’s daily shows at the Venice nightclub. It was 1971. India was savouring its newfound place on the world’s stage. The country’s armed forces had decisively liberated Bangladesh and the idealism of Independence had welled up again. India’s middle classes were capturing their polyester memories on Agfa Click IIIs that cost 46.50 rupees (taxes extra), aspiring to the lifestyles of “The Jet Set Air Hostesses” described in The Illustrated Weekly of India (price: 85 paise), and being encouraged by newspaper ads to “Go gay with Gaylord fine filter cigarettes”.
As the City of Gold bubbled through its jazz age, Lorna and Chris enthralled Bombay with their shows at Venice each night. Remo Fernandes, who would go on to become the first Indian pop musician to record an album of original English-language tunes, was among those locked in the spell. “Two artists sometimes ignite a creative chemistry in each other which goes beyond all logical explanation. Mere mortals can only look and listen in awe,” he rhapsodised. “In such duos, one plus one does not make two. It makes a number so immeasurable, it defies all laws of calculus.”
But the sparks that flew at Venice gradually built into a roaring conflagration. As Remo put it: “Hyper-intense, high-temperament artistic relationships often end in emotional disaster, like two comets when they steer too dangerously close. Chris’s and Lorna’s, as we all know, was no exception.”
Like the myths about the city in which they soared to fame, the tale of Chris and Lorna has gained so much in the re-telling it’s sometimes difficult to thresh the apocrypha from the actual. Thirty years after the two stopped performing together, old-time musicians in the bylanes of Dhobi Talao and Bandra still beg anonymity as they reminisce in sad whispers.
“He was shameless. He left his wife and three small children for that girl.”
“Chris and Lorna were in love. When they fought, they became mortal enemies. He destroyed her and he destroyed himself.”
“She was very good singer. Beyond that, she was nothing. She got her break with Chris Perry. He made contract with her. She couldn’t sing without his permission. She had no brains, so she signed. Then he went back to his wife.”
“He didn’t let her perform with anyone else. He threatened to break the legs of one Hindu fellow who tried to get her to sing with him.”
“She hit the bottle, men. She became an alcoholic and just disappeared.”
Chris Perry who was born Pereira died on January 25, 2002, his last years hobbled by Parkinson’s disease. Lorna has refused to recount her version of events for publication. But the fidelity of her contralto booming out of our speakers, embroidered with Chris’s perfectly crafted sax filigrees, speaks its own truth.
Ronnie Monserrate was 19 when he began to play Sunday gigs at Venice with the Chris Perry band, sitting in for the regular pianist. Venice had a reputation. It was the jazzman’s jazz haunt, the rendezvous for musicians from around the country and occasionally from around the world. Dave Brubeck swung by when he visited Bombay in 1958, as Duke Ellington had when his band set out on their famous world tour of 1963. As Ronnie tells it, the dapper Chris Perry was the musician’s musician: “He had perfect pitch. He was an arranger, a composer, a player.” Chris played both trumpet and saxophone, sometimes switching from one to the other mid-tune, a feat that required elaborate lip control. His trumpet tone was broad and true. He didn’t have flashy technique, but the notes he coaxed out of his horn had a mellowness that kept the fans coming back night after night.
Chris was 43 at the time, Lorna was 25. No one seems quite sure exactly how they met, but everyone’s agreed that he groomed her into one of the Bombay’s finest crooners. One version maintains that Lorna got her break when still in school, after she won the Connie Francis soundalike competition at Metro cinema. This prompted a musician named Raymond Albuqerque to invite her to sing in his show at the Bandra Fair. Her rendition of Underneath the Mango Tree got the crowds so fired up that Chris Perry, already an established performer, went to her home to audition her. She was just 16 when she joined Perry’s band.
A vocalist in the Shirley Bassey mould, Lorna belted out every tune like it was her last time on stage. “She had a lot of black feel,” is how Ronnie describes her performances. “You could see the intensity when she was on stage. She’d give it her best, every time. She was like a magnet. You couldn’t help but be attracted to her when she was on stage. And with Chris Perry band by her side, it was like magic happening. There was incredible attraction. There was a lot of love in the interaction. It was apparent in their body language. They brought out the best in each other. They’d look into each other’s eyes and their understanding was so great that there’d be spontaneous combustion.”
Offstage, though, things could get awkward. Any man attempting to talk to Lorna was liable to get a taste of Perry’s famously volatile fists. During breaks, the musicians would sit around their table, absolutely silent. “They were jolly people but they were afraid to laugh around Chris,” Ronnie says. Ronnie was the only exception, perhaps because his youth made him seem unthreatening. Two decades later, he’d find opportunity to call in that bond of trust.
Venice was around the corner from Bombay’s swinging jazz strip, Churchgate Street (now Veer Nariman Road). Pianists, trios and quartets were to be heard all the way down the 200-metre thoroughfare as it led off from Churchgate station to the Arabian Sea. First came Berry’s, with tandoori butter chicken that was the stuff of Bombay legend and accomplished piano-fronted groups led by Dorothy Jones and Stanley Pinto. Across the fence was Bombelli’s, named after its Swiss owner, where a trio held sway as ad men sipped cappuccinos. Then came the Ambassador, where Toni Pinto’s quintet encapsulated Bombay’s diversity: the group had two Jews a singer named Ephrim Elias and drummer Abie Cohen, an Anglo-Indian tenor saxophonist named Norman Mobsby, and, in addition to Pinto, another Goan, the bassist Clement Furtado.
Pinto’s kingdom was named the Other Room, so called because after the rich and famous had finished drinking at the bar, they’d say, “Let’s go to the other room.” He ruled for 16 years from 1958, his sharply dressed group spinning out hard-driving bop and light classics, and playing back-up for cabarets and visiting acrobats, magicians and flamenco dancers. The Ambassador was owned by the cigar-chomping Jack Voyantzis, an ebullient Greek who was assisted by his brother, Socrates. The siblings had started their subcontinental journey in Rangoon, opened a café in Delhi, and finally found their way to Bombay, where they transformed a hotel known as the Argentinian into the Ambassador. The cream of Bombay society turned out to catch Toni’s tightly-rehearsed band. Toni remembers once looking up from his piano to see three of the city’s leading editors appreciatively tapping their feet: Rusi Karanjia, editor of the left-wing tabloid Blitz, D F Karaka, editor of the rival Current, and Frank Moraes, editor of the Indian Express, with his American girlfriend. Another time, as the band was going through its routine, Toni realised that someone from the back of the room was playing along on a trumpet. It turned out to be American hornman Eddie Calvert. “He came for dinner one night even though he was staying at the Ritz,” Toni says, and he asked his drummer, Bobby Hadrian, to go back and get his instrument. Calvert and Toni’s band jammed for an hour, playing the tunes the American had made famous: Cherry Pink, Begin the Beguine, Wonderland by Night.
Elsewhere on Churchgate Street, music spilled out through the doors of the Napoli, The Talk of the Town and Gaylord’s. Opposite Venice, there was jazz at the Ritz, while at the Little Hut, Neville Thomas led a group calling itself Three Guys and a Doll. Past Flora Fountain stood Bistro and Volga, home to a quartet led by the grandfatherly baritone saxophonist Hecke Kingdom.
Dave Brubeck was impressed enough by the local musicians to attempt to make some recordings with them during his visit. But Bombay defeated him. He later recounted the episode to an interviewer: “The current fluctuated in Bombay in those days and so the tape would speed up and slow down. Like, when you were shaving, the speed of the motor would go up and down. It ruined one of my favourite tapes I've ever made.” Another visiting jazzman, the pianist Hampton Hawes, was overwhelmed by problems that were rather more basic. “Bombay turned me around,” he wrote. “I’d never seen poverty before.” Art, he decided, was irrelevant amidst the gnawing deprivation. “Here I was thinking about making a big splash, a hit record, going home a hero, and I’m walking the streets with motherfuckers who don’t even know what a piece of bread is, let along Stravinsky or Charlie Parker. If Bird was alive and played for them they wouldn’t be able to hear him because they’d be too damn hungry.”
Admittedly, jazz had always been the preserve of Bombay’s elite. But while the audiences were upper crust, the musicians who cooked up the syncopated rhythms were not. Like Toni Pinto, Ronnie Monserrate, Chris and Lorna, the majority were Roman Catholics strivers from the former Portuguese colony of Goa, 550 kilometres south of Bombay. They’d been an important part of the Bombay music scene since the 1920s, when Bombay began to develop its appetite for what was then called “hot music”. Jazz had made its way from New Orleans in the waxy grooves of phonograph records and travelled over the oceans with touring American bands that played for the administrators of the Raj. Bombay’s first jazz concerts were performed at the Bandstand, south of the Oval. Among the earliest jazzmen to play an extended stint in Bombay was Leon Abbey, a violinist from Minnesota, who led an eight-piece band at the Taj during the 1935-’36 season. Abbey wore white tails on stage and played the freshest sounds. He told one interviewer, “I kept up with the latest numbers because someone would always come up to the bandstand and say, ‘Old Bean, would you play so and so…’, because as far as he was concerned, we should know how to play everything that had ever been written.” Midway through the trip, the Taj management sent Abbey and saxophonist Art Lanier back to New York to pick up the latest music.
Abbey’s outfit was replaced by the Symphonians, fronted by the cornet player Cricket Smith. Smith had been featured on the seminal recordings made by James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra in 1913 and 1914, capturing jazz at the moment of its transition from the relatively unsophisticated ragtime style. Smith “signed his contract for a fixed amount of money and two Coronas a day, so every day, the manager would have to bring him his cigars”, recalls Luis Moreno, a Spanish trumpet player who lived in Bombay for 20 years. “He was a character.”
In 1938, pianist Teddy Weatherford, who had played with Louis Armstrong, took the stage with his men. His swinging style and treble voicing had been an important influence on jazz during its formative years. The Taj, it would seem, wasn’t quite the genteel venue it now is not at least from the way Weatherford’s occasional Russian bassist named ‘Innocent Nick’ described the gigs to the jazz magazine Storyville. “Teddy used to play downstairs, in the Tavern of the Taj, for the soldiers, sailors and others, a very rough place,” Nick said. “Teddy would play for hours without a break. Even with drinks, he would continue one-handed. He had tremendous hands.”
For the African-American musicians, Bombay provided refuge from the apartheid in the U.S. Men like Weatherford and his sidemen, such as the saxophonist Roy Butler, spent long years shuttling between Europe and the subcontinent, where racial barriers seemed non-existent, at least for them. Butler’s years in India as a Weatherford sideman, he told Storyville, were among his happiest the work was relatively easy, the pay and conditions good, he was treated splendidly by both management and clientele, and enjoyed the luxurious life under the British Raj. The Taj management, on its part, honoured Weatherford by naming a dish after him: Poires Glace Weatherford. (The absence of colour prejudice was only to be expected. After all, industrial baron Jamshetji Tata was moved to build the Taj after being prevented one leisurely Bombay evening from dining at the Europeans-only Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel. Later, he famously hung a notice in the Taj forbidding entry to South Africans and dogs.)
Weatherford’s sidemen were an eclectic lot and opened Bombay’s ears to a wealth of new sounds, the Cuban drumming of Luis Pedroso and the Spanish brass of Luis Moreno, among them. Butler, who was known as the Reverend in acknowledgement of his abstemious ways, helped Weatherford drill the band. Moreno characterised Butler as the “gentleman of the orchestra”. Moreno added, “He never drank in his life and if someone said, ‘How about a round of drink?’ Roy would say, ‘I’ll have an ice-cream. You enjoy beer, I enjoy ice-cream.” Butler went on to lead his own band at Greens, located where the Taj Intercontinental now stands.
Both Weatherford (who married an Anglo-Indian woman, before dying of cholera in Calcutta in 1945, aged 41) and Butler recruited Goan sidemen, plugging Bombay into the source of jazz. The trumpet player Frank Fernand, who played in Weatherford band with his Goan compatriots, Micky Correa and Josique Menzies, says that his stint with the American taught him to “play like a negro”. Moreno helped Fernand develop the ability to hit long, high notes, eventually extending his range up to E flat. Butler, it must be noted, was less than thrilled with his Goan employees. “My short stretch as a bandleader in India was not too earth-shaking,” he told Storyville. “The local musicians were not too familiar with jazz at that time. I understood that there are some very good jazzmen out there now, but the time was too short for anything to develop, good or bad.” For their part, some of the Goan musicians weren’t overly impressed with Butler, either. They believed his decision to stay in India was motivated by the fear that he wouldn’t find work in the US. As Fernand put it, “The faltu fellows stayed, the good ones went home.”
---- Continued in Part 2 ----
This article in Word format was sent to me, on request, by the Editor of MansWorld Magazine, N.Radhakrishnan, thus saving me the trouble of typing it out. Please reciprocate his good gesture by visiting the site http://www.mansworldindia.com
Cheers!
Cecil
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