World Jazz Day: India’s Astonishing Links With the Music Genre

This World Jazz Day, read about India’s astonishing links with the music genre as HR Venkatesh writes.

(This article has been reposted from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of International Jazz Day 2017. This piece was originally published on 30 April 2016.)

It’s International Jazz Day. Across the world, this UNESCO-sponsored event will bring together students, artists, academics and jazz enthusiasts across the world. There will be gigs, a lot of improvisation and of course, articles on the greatness of jazz.

So why should we care?

Because India and jazz have an old and enduring bond that continues to influence a lot of our music, even Bollywood music. And because jugaad, eulogised as an Indian-only trait, is one of the central tenets of jazz.

The music form may have originated in America, but jazz is everywhere in India now. Author of Mumbai’s jazz history, Taj Mahal Foxtrot, Naresh Fernandes, currently Editor at Scroll.in says:

Jazz could be found even in mofussil India, especially in railway colonies and cantonment towns. For instance in 1935 in Munger district, there was a Filipino jazz band.

There is a tendency to think of jazz as elitist and ‘difficult to get’ but the truth, if anything, is quite the opposite. Fernandes says jazz mostly incorporates three aspects: “Jazz is based on the blues, it is improvisational in nature, and it swings”.

In other words, jazz music is something you can really groove to with abandon and its improvisational nature speaks to the jugaadu in every one of us. Fernandes’ website on the story of jazz has several treasures, including the improbable Carnatic pair of MS Lavanya and MS Subbulaxmi known as the Saxophone Sisters.

More famously, composer RD Burman, who famously dipped into different forms of music, incorporated jazz into his songs. Other composers too have used jazz freely.

Here’s a selection for you to enjoy.