Jazz In India

Chris Perry

Chris Perry, born Pereira was a Goan musician, composer, songwriter and film producer. He was an exceptionally gifted trumpeter but was also at ease with blowing instruments like saxophone, trumpet and flute as well as finger instruments like keyboard, piano and guitar. He revolutionized the Konkani music scene by introducing jazz music and is credited with taking Konkani popular music to a new level.

Anthony Gonsalves

Anthony Gonsalves wanted to compose raga-based symphonies that could be performed in the world’s leading concert halls. He travelled to Bombay in 1943, already a seasoned musician at 16. He had been recognised as a child prodigy and appointed choirmaster at a local church at age 12. He found his first job in the city as a violinist in the group of the composer Naushad in 1943.

Dizzy Sal

Edward Saldanha born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1934, was an Indian jazz pianist. He was a student at the Lenox School of Jazz and the Berklee School of Music. Saldanha came from a musical family and it's believed that he brought jazz to Bollywood.

Joe Pereira (Jazzy Joe)

Joe Pereira started performing in 1941, aged only 14, in a band in Lahore’s Stiffle’s Hotel fronted by his cousin, the legendary Sebastian D’Souza. After spending much of his career in Lahore, Delhi and Calcutta, Pereira returned to Bombay in the 1980s and helped train a bunch of enthusiastic hornmen (and hornwomen) who performed occasionally as the Jazz Junkeys.

Usha Uthup

Usha Uthup hasn’t stepped out of the spotlight since she first started belting out Broadway tunes and pop standards in 1969 in venues similar to this one, depicted in the 1972 film Bombay to Goa. She’s performed across the length of the country, recorded more than two dozen albums and has been featured on several popular Bollywood tracks.

Chic Chocolate

Chic Chocolate, born Antonio Xavier Vaz in 1916 in Goa played an important role in introducing and developing jazz in India. A trumpeter par excellence, he played the violin, saxophone, piano, and rhythm instruments with equal virtuosity. He was heavily inspired by Louis Armstrong and was often referred to as the “Louis Armstrong of Bombay”.

Braz Gonsalves

A native of Goa, the territory in western India that was a Portuguese colony for 451 years until 1961, Gonsalves grew up studying Western classical music in his parish school. Curiously, his first job was in a circus band. But his talent was too enormous to be contained by a canvas tent and he was soon leading bands in prominent nightclubs in Bombay and Calcutta.

Mickey Correa

Correa, who was born in Mombasa and who spent his childhood in Karachi, belonged to the first generation of Indian musicians to play jazz. He and his contemporaries perfected their skills in the late 1930s in the bands of African-American musicians like the pianist Teddy Weatherford and the trumpet player Crickett Smith – men who spent long years in India, preaching the gospel of jazz.

Lucilla Pacheco

In the 1940s, Lucilla Pacheco was one of the few women on the Bombay jazz scene, playing in the all-star band of Mickey Correa at the Taj Mahal Hotel and with the Anglo-Indian band leader Ken Mac. She later joined the Hindi film industry and performed regularly with the arranger Anthony Gonsalves. But she isn’t remembered merely for being a woman in a man’s world. In the 1960s, she introduced Hindi films to their first electronic instrument: the Solovox.

Asha Puthli

The unconventional sense of temporality has decisively defined the Mumbai-born musician’s 35-year-long career. Puthli first gained international attention in 1971 performing jazz – a form that encourages musicians to play with rhythm, to glide on top or below the beat rather than hitting it predictably in the middle.

Amancio D'Silva

Amancio D’Silva’s journey started in Parel. 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. 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 to learn how to play the banjo, though the boy later moved on to the guitar.