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Amancio again His sound travels from Parel to London and back. Naresh Fernandes profiles the late guitarist Amancio D'Silva, whose sinuous melodies can be heard once again with the re-release of his records. It's the sound of music on the move. Originating in Mumbai's mill district of Parel, swinging for the royal family of Jaipur and eventually finding its way into wax in the recording studios of London, the pioneering Indo-jazz fusion tunes of Amancio D'Silva are being rediscovered with great delight a decade after the guitar player passed away in July 1996 – and more than three decades after they were first recorded. The Amancio revival gathered pace with the issue in the a few weeks ago of Konkan Dance, an album recorded in 1974 that inexplicably has never been published before. Predating by several years the now-celebrated fusion sounds of Shakti and running almost parallel to the efforts of American saxman John Coltrane's far-better-known efforts to use an Indian approach to jazz improvisation, the five albums D'Silva recorded between 1969 and 1972 after he moved to Britain are finally being accorded their rightful place in jazz history. The titles of D'Silva's compositions give a clue to the things that are important to him: "Jaipur" and "Maharani" pay homage to his mentor Gayatri Devi, "Joyce Country" is named for his wife, "What Maria Sees" and "Song for Francesca" are named for his two daughters, while the Konkan Dance album opens with a tune about the city of his birth, "A Street in Bombay". The re-evaluation of the musician's work started in earnest in 2003 when BBC Radio 1 DJ Giles Petersen included "Jaipur" on a collection of underground and progressive British jazz from the '60s, and the momentum increased when Impressed with Gilles Petersen Vol 2 released the next year featured another D'Silva track, "A Street in Bombay ". Finally, 18 months ago, Universal decided to re-release Integration, an album that featured Hindustani-tinged tunes composed by the Indian musician and performed along with some of the most cutting-edge British jazzmen of the time. The critics were more than satisfied. The album was described by Time Out London as "a revelation" and it praised D'Silva's reinvention of "jazz as a music forged in Bombay, not New Orleans ". The Guardian noted: "Of all the attempts to bring together jazz and Indian music, this must be one of the most successful…[The tunes] strike a perfect balance between the two idioms, and there is none of that phoney 'Eastern' flavouring, featuring sitars and such like, so fashionable at the time. D'Silva plays electric guitar throughout, and the music swings in a completely natural way." To be fair, they were only echoing the observations that critics had made when the record was first released. "The compositions… reflect his preoccupation with effecting an Indian music-jazz blend," the influential Melody Maker magazine said of D'Silva in 1970. "Since Coltrane, this has been a vogue… D'Silva's grasp of both styles ensures that his blend is far more authentic than a lot of the jazz-raga which is hawked about. His playing too has an individual stamp." The renewed interest in Amancio D'Silva's music has thrilled his family. "I just dig that the music can get to the people who might dig it," D'Silva's son, Stephano, said in an email interview from London . "The rest is just a by-product of the real thing." Stephano D'Silva, himself a musician, said that a bundle of factors is responsible for the re-issue of his father's albums. "The first thing I remember happening is my asking Universal (whom I'd been told had inherited EMI's Columbia catalogue, who had made the albums) if they indeed had rights to the recordings," he said. "They were a little unclear at first, and then bingo! Gilles Petersons' Impressed was on the cards, with "Jaipur", taken from Hum Dono, the album with [West Indian saxophonist] Joe Harriot. It seems timing is everything." The renewed availability of the albums is also being keenly followed in Mumbai, where D'Silva grew up. "I'm very proud of my brother," his sister Antoinette Fernandes, who lives in Bandra, told Time Out. Added Raymond Albuquerque, who got his first job playing drums in a quartet led by Amancio D'Silva at Juhu's Sun and Sand hotel in 1965, "He was in a league of his own. I heard [British guitar great] John McLaughlin when he played in Bombay with [pioneering mid-1970s world music group] Shakti, but I didn't find it outstanding because I'd already heard Amancio. He was really ahead of his time." Amancio D'Silva's journey started in Parel in 1936. The son of an employee of Kohinoor Mills, he was the only brother in a family with five daughters, all of whom had names beginning with the letter A. His sister Antoinette recalls that he displayed an early talent for music, and that his interest was nurtured by an uncle named John Carvalho, who played in a band called the Highhatters. Carvalho helped D'Silva learn how to play the banjo, though the boy later moved on to the guitar. His skills were sharpened when he joined the band at his school, Don Bosco's in Matunga. Soon after, he was playing at Parsi weddings and at gymkhanas with the much-loved Nellie and her Swing Band. By his early twenties, Antoinette Fernandes said, her brother was touring with his own group, playing in Delhi, Nainital and Mussoorie. D'Silva probably sharpened his ear for Hindustani sounds when he, like many Goan jazz musicians of his age, worked in Hindi film studios by day, to supplement his income from jazz clubs. Among others, D'Silva worked with Laxmikant and Pyarelal. At any rate, he was already playing Indian-influenced jazz by 1965, when he led a group called the Sundowners at the Sun and Sand. "He had his own style of playing the guitar," says drummer Raymond Albuquerque. "His technique was superb. He'd composed numbers in raga forms. He was that obsessed with music. Sometimes, he'd get up in the middle of the night to play new ideas." On one of his gigs up north, playing at a restaurant named Davico's in Simla, D'Silva met his future wife, an Irish woman named Joyce who was teaching at a Catholic convent school in the hill station. After they got married, D'Silva and his family (which now included his baby daughter Maria) moved to Jaipur, where he played at the Rambagh Palace Hotel. "Amancio became an unusual choice of court musician for the Maharani, Gayatri Devi, leading a jazz/dance band at the palace," Stephano D'silva says on the website he's compiled about his father. "It was the Maharani who bought Amancio his first quality western-built instrument, a Gibson (apparently a semi-acoustic), which she picked up for him while on a trip to the US." By 1966, D'Silva was in Delhi, playing under the legendary saxophonist Braz Gonsalves at a venue called Laguna. It's likely that this stint had a deep influence on the sounds he made later, because Gonsalves was intensely exploring raga-based jazz. "This thing had just started, trying to improvise on ragas," Gonsalves recalls. "Our music was actually for the future – when I see what's happening now, we'd already done it at that time. It was really creative music." But shortly after, D'Silva's newly born son, Stephano, was discovered to have an acute blood condition. Antoinette Fernandes says that it was Gayatri Devi who suggested that D'Silva seek treatment in England, and who paid for his son's treatment, as well as the move. The D'Silvas arrived in London in the spring of 1967. It wasn't easy at first. Amancio D'Silva worked as a cleaner and as a musician at a pub in east London called the Prospect of Whitby, before he found gigs in other clubs. His break came when he attracted the attention of a record producer named Denis Preston, the man the Grove Encyclopaedia of Music credits with coining the term "fusion". "Denis was teaming unique musicians from the folk and jazz idioms and, with a rare emphasis on artistic freedom, recording these collaborations for his company, Record Supervision," Stephano D'Silva says in his liner note for Konkan Dance. The first of those efforts, Integration, lined up D'Silva alongside trumpet player Iain Carr and saxophone player Don Rendell, among others. "This is one of the most effortless and natural albums that I've ever helped to make," Carr wrote on the sleeve notes to Integration. "From the moment Denis Preston introduced me to Amancio D'Silva, a kind of dreamlike inspiration seemed to pervade our whole relationship and ideas for our project arrived out of nowhere…It is his feelings for both musical traditions – Indian and jazz – that makes a logical integration possible in this album. His melodic flair is Indian, but…he swings like a jazzman." The period also saw D'Silva trading ideas on an album called Hum Dono with Jamaican-born saxophonist Joe Harriott, who only a few years earlier had recorded two albums with Calcutta-born violin player John Mayer titled the Indo-Jazz Suites. "I think my father had a great deal of respect for [Joe Harriott] as a musician, and felt quite deeply for him as a person," Stephano D'Silva said. "His passing away upset my father very much." Stephano D'Silva emphasised that his father's summer of musical creativity "was also a period necessitating financial creativity, driven by the need to feed and clothe his family". He explained, "He was not living in any bourgeois artistic idyll that some may assume musicians of that time were." Konkan Dance in 1974 was D'Silva's last recording for Preston. "For reasons unknown, it never saw a release in spite of the fact that the artwork was prepared for it," Stephano D'Silva writes in his liner notes. "What remains is a ¼ inch studio tape copy, thankfully in perfect condition, given to Amancio in the mid-1970s by Denis, whose enterprise at [the Lansdowne recording studios in London's Holland Park] also ended around the same time." Stephano D'Silva says his father stopped recording because he "was a bit fed up" that his company was not "forthcoming on royalty issues". Still, he continued to perform, stopping only when forced to by a series of severe strokes. But even that didn't stop him teaching, said Stephano D'Silva. Amancio D'Silva initially taught at Jenako Arts, in London's East End, and later at the Krishnamurti International School in Hampshire. In an interview to Jazz Journal shortly before he passed away in 1996, D'Silva made it clear that he believed emotion was far more important than technique. "Technically, today we are miles ahead, but [there is] no feeling," he said. "Why do they have to go play jazz? Jazz is something from the heart." Stephano D'Silva suggests that his father would perhaps be surprised at the posthumous praise being heaped upon him. "I hardly heard my father use terms such as fusion, jazz, crossover, and so on," he said. "He had little to say. He just played." Konkan Dance (8.99 pounds) and Integration (10.99 pounds) are available online from www.hmv.co.uk. Write to Editor
