BY NARESH FERNANDES
Midway through Manmohan Desai’s classic 1977 film about three
brothers separated at birth, a man in a
top hat and a Saturday Night Fever suit leaps out of a giant Easter egg
to inform the assemblage, "My name is Anthony Gonsalves."
The significance of the announcement was lost under the impact
of Amitabh Bachchan’s sartorial exuberance. But decades later, the memory of
that moment still sends shivers down the spines of scores of ageing men
scattered across Bombay and Goa. By invoking the name of his violin teacher in
that tune in Amar Akbar Anthony, the composer Pyarelal had finally
validated the lives of scores of Goan Catholic musicians whose working years had
been illuminated by the flicker of images dancing across white screens in
airless sound studios, even as acknowledgement of their talent whizzed by in the
flash of small-type credit titles.
The arc of their stories – determined by the intersection of
passion and pragmatism, of empire and exigency – originated in church-run
schools in Portuguese Goa and darted through royal courts in Rajasthan, jazz
clubs in Calcutta and army cantonments in Murree. Those lines eventually
converged on Bombay’s film studios, where the Goan Catholic arrangers worked
with Hindu music composers and Muslim lyricists in an era of intense creativity
that would soon come to be recognised as the golden age of Hindi film song.
The Nehruvian dream could not have found a more appropriate
harmonic expression.
A few months back, a friend called to tell me about a new
character he’d discovered in a story published by Delhi-based Raj Comics:
Anthony Gonsalves. On the page (and accessible only if you read Hindi), Anthony
Gonsalves is part of the great Undead, the tribe doomed to live between the
worlds. It wasn’t always like this. In his prime, Anthony Gonsalves was a
mild-mannered guitar player who had devised a magical new sound known as ‘crownmusic’.
But his jealous rivals tortured him to death so that they could steal his work.
Now the magnificently muscled superhero emerges from the grave each night to
prevent the desperate from committing suicide and to rid the world of evil,
informed of imminent misfortune by his pet crow.
Repeated calls to Raj Comics failed to disgorge the phone
number of Tarunkumar Wahi, the creator of the series, so I was unable to
establish how the comic-book character had come to get his name. But I couldn’t
help thinking how the predicament of the leotard-clad figure was not unlike that
of the real Anthony Gonsalves, whose home in the sleepy Goan village of Majorda
I had visited only weeks earlier: both had attempted to connect disparate worlds
and both had been left with the gnawing dissatisfaction of a mission unfinished.
Thirty years after he quit the film industry in 1965 to avail of
a travelling grant from Syracuse University in upstate New York, Anthony
Gonsalves continues to arouse the curiosity of his contemporaries. He departed
at the height of his popularity and, even after he returned from America a
decade later, never swung his baton again. In fact, he scarcely bothered to let
his former colleagues know that he was back. As I met with musicians in Bombay
and Goa in an attempt to piece together a portrait of their lives and work in
the studios, many of them insisted that he was still in America – if indeed he
was still alive.
The 77-year-old maestro offered no explanations for his
seclusion. His speech was slow and his thoughts sometimes incoherent, as if
confirming rumours that he’d suffered a nervous breakdown in America when he
realised that he wouldn’t be able to make a living as a composer in a country
whose music colleges turn out thousands of aspiring composers every year. But in
moments of clarity (which formed most of the three hours we chatted), Gonsalves
pulled out photographs and yellowing newspaper clippings to take me back to the
time in the mid-1960s when he’d attempted to merge the symphonies of his Goan
heritage with the Hindustani melodies and rhythms he had come to discover in the
film studios.
In this, Gonsalves’ ambition outstripped that of his
contemporaries. Goan musicians had been sought after by film composers since the
’40s, when AB Albuquerque and Peter Dorado teamed up with a Sikh saxophone
player named Ram Singh to form the ARP Party – an acronym that in those uneasy
years also stood for Air Raid Police. The source of their appeal lay across a
yawning musical chasm: while Indian classical music has a melodic basis, western
classical music – in which Goans had been rigorously trained in parish schools
established by the Portuguese who had ruled their home state since 1510 – has a
harmonic foundation. To wit, all the performers at an Indian classical music
concert reiterate the same melodic line, but western classical ensembles play
different notes of related pitches.
When Hindi film music entered a period of rapid evolution during
the Second World War, composers realised that the small groups they’d previously
used could not effectively convey the drama unfolding on screen. So they formed
large orchestras that ranged dholaks and sitars along with banks
of violins, swathes of trumpets and a Hawaiian guitar or two. Since not many
musicians from other communities knew how to play saxophones or clarinets, Goans
came to form the bulk of the orchestras. But they also had another, rather more
influential role. Until then, composers would rehearse their groups (which
usually had fewer than 10 musicians) until they’d memorised their parts before
leading them into recording sessions. But if the members of an orchestra were to
play in unison and the tone colour of their instruments was to be employed most
effectively, they needed to read the notes off scores, with each musician’s role
clearly laid out. Few Hindi film composers, most of whom were trained in the
Hindustani classical tradition, knew how to score music for the new ensembles.
That task was performed by a Goan ‘arranger’.
Typically, the work proceeded thus. The producer would organise
a ‘sitting’ (as the Goans came to call the baithaks) at which the
composer (most often a Hindu), the lyricist (usually an Urdu-speaking Muslim)
and the arranger would flop down on comfortable cushions to listen to the
director narrate the plot. When the director indicated the point at which a song
was necessary, the composer would hum out a melody or pick it out on his
harmonium. It was the arranger’s task to note down these fragments, which the
composer would later piece together into an entire song.
But even then, the composer would craft only the verse and the
chorus. The arranger was responsible for fashioning the melodic bridges, for
shaping the parts for individual instruments and often even wrote the background
music. The arranger wasn’t merely a secretary. As I discovered while researching
a previous essay, the Goans drew on their bicultural heritage to give Bollywood
music its promiscuous charm, slipping in slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese
fados, Ellingtonesque doodles, cha cha cha, Mozart and Bach themes. Long
before fusion music became fashionable, it was being performed every day in
Bombay’s film studios.
But Anthony Gonsalves wanted to push the envelope even further.
He 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
choir master 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. His talent was
overwhelmingly apparent and he soon graduated to doing arrangements for
composers around the city. He was also a highly prized teacher.
Every Sunday, his apartment at Sushila Sadan on Bandra’s Linking
Road was thrown open to eager students, two of whom – RD Burman and Pyarelal –
would become significant composers themselves. Unlike many of his Goan peers,
whose western-trained ears couldn’t quite wrap themselves around the sinuous
lines of Hindustani tunes (though they could play them well enough from a
score), Gonsalves developed a deep passion for raga-based music. "It
struck me very hard in my heart and my mind," he explained. "Melodically and
rhythmically it is so rich."
When other musicians went off for a smoke between takes, he’d
engage in jugalbandi call-and-answer jam sessions with the flautist
Pannalal Ghosh. He sought out Pandit Ram Narayan, Pandit Shyam Sunder and Ustad
Inam Ali Khan to deepen his knowledge of the tradition. Soon he was trying to
find ways to meld the two systems. After a hard day in the studios, he would
spend his nights committing to paper the fantasies in his head. It wasn’t easy.
"A raga isn’t like a ladder, on which you take one step at time," he told
me. "It’s like a path up the mountain. It winds more and there are unusual
intervals between stages."
He gave his creations names like Sonatina Indiana,
Concerto in Raag Sarang and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in Todi
Taal. In April 1958, his dream took voice for the first time. Gonsalves
founded (and funded) the Indian Symphony Orchestra, a group of 110 musicians
assembled specifically to perform his compositions. "I paid my own money to put
up this concert because I wanted to show the richness of our country’s music,"
Gonsalves explained. Featuring playback singers Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey as
soloists, the works were performed in the quadrangle of St. Xavier’s College to
an eager audience. "It wasn’t fusion," Gonsalves insisted. "I just took ragas
and scored them for an orchestra and choir."
Other concerts followed. But by many accounts, the experiments
were hailed with less enthusiasm than Gonsalves had anticipated. The composer
Vanraj Bhatia, who was in the audience, remembers the performance as being
ambitious but ‘a little filmi’. Nonetheless, the events boosted Gonsalves’
reputation sufficiently to earn him a fellowship to New York a few years later.
He was vague about what he did in the US, but a proud certificate on the wall of
his Goa house attests that he is a member of the American Society of Composers,
Publishers and Authors. He claims he returned to India because his family needed
him, but his chronology of events seemed confused. He shrugged off questions
about why he didn’t return to the film industry and about how he kept himself
occupied since.
It was time to leave.
Compared to the journey of other Goan musicians, Anthony
Gonsalves’ story is unusual, not just for his singular devotion to Hindustani
music but also for the brevity of his route to the studios. Even before they
found their niche in the Hindi film industry, music had always proved a
dependable avenue for Goans to make a living. Though some people have
retrospectively developed what the writer Fredrick Noronha describes as ‘Lustalgia’,
an inflated sense of yearning for the (often imaginary) benefits of the
Lusitanian empire, the Portuguese did little to educate or employ Goans.
This necessitated a continuous stream of migration out of the
emerald territory. Bombay – ruled by another European sovereign – was often a
stepping stone to other territories held by the British. Goans marched into
police and military bands across the subcontinent and in East Africa. Others
made their way into symphony orchestras at royal courts. In an engaging article
about Bombay’s early Goan musicians, the historian Teresa Albuquerque writes
about Josique Menzies, a Goan musician born in the Seychelles who was employed
by the Maharaja of Bikaner.
By the ’30s, Goan dance bands had been established in most major
cities and hill-stations across the subcontinent. Though schooled in the western
classical tradition, many of them demonstrated a strong affinity for a musical
trend that was the rage across the globe: hot jazz.
To be sure, India was no stranger to African-American music. The
first performance of ‘minstrelsy’ music in the subcontinent was held in 1849,
when a legendary musician named William Bernard stopped in India on his way back
from Australia. African-American performers followed each decade after that and
by the time ragtime had metamorphosed into jazz, India’s appetite for hot music
was being fed by a steady stream of records from America. Still, the Indian jazz
scene didn’t really take off until the mid-’30s, when the Taj Mahal hotel in
Bombay hired its first resident jazz outfit, a nine-piece band led by a
violinist from Minnesota named Leon Abbey.
But it was the bands that succeeded him, led by a cornet player
named Crickett Smith and a pianist named Teddy Weatherford, that left the
deepest impression on the subcontinent: they hired local Anglo-Indian and Goan
musicians – Josique Mezies, Karachi-born Mickey Correa and trumpet player Frank
Fernand, among them – and helped them discover the song of their souls. "Jazz
gave us freedom of expression," Frank Fernand, now in his late eighties and
stricken with Parkinson’s, told me. "You played jazz the way you feel – morning
you play differently, evening you play differently."
When the Hindi film industry came looking for musicians who
played brass and string instruments to brighten its hues, Bombay’s jazz
musicians were their first targets. Soon after, as the demand for dance bands in
the far-flung provinces declined with the departure of the British, more swing
musicians were available to fill the rosters. The most famous of the
post-Independence Goan entrants to the film industry was Sebastian D’Souza, who
had led the house band at Stiffle’s hotel in Lahore and managed outfits in
Murree and other towns in what later became Pakistan. After an initial struggle
in Bombay, D’Souza found himself doing arrangements for the duo of Shankar and
Jaikishan, striking up a collaboration that lasted more than two decades. "He
expanded the palette of colours for the film orchestras," the composer Vanraj
Bhatia said. "Shankar-Jaikishan wouldn’t have their signature style if it hadn’t
been for Sebastian’s genius."
But the figure from that period who really intrigued the jazz
obsessive in me was a kinky-haired hornman who went by the stage name Chic
Chocolate. Chic – who was born Antonio Xavier Vaz in Aldona in 1916 – died in
1967, two years before I was born. But his legacy lives on through the dynasty
that he founded: his three daughters – Yvonne, Ursula and Kittu – each married a
jazz musician, and my interest in the genre burst into life at their concerts.
My curiosity about the man who was known as the Louis Armstrong of India reached
fever pitch a year ago, when I came to realise that he’d actually cut several 78
RPM records in the ’40s and ’50s.
I made a frenzied flurry of phone calls to his family to try to
obtain copies of the songs, which are probably the first original jazz tunes
ever recorded in India. As it turned out, they had only one. Still, they
graciously let me leaf through their photo albums and their memories of the man
his contemporaries credited not only with looking like a ‘Negro’, but also
playing like one. (I later found a stash of Chic Chocolate records through
fellow obsessives at the Society of Indian Record Collectors. His prowess, I was
delighted to discover, had not been overstated.)
Like all his Goan contemporaries, Chic learned music at his
local parochial school, and first earned acclaim as a child singing at ‘kheols’,
street-side musical plays that are often mounted around Christmas. No one’s
quite sure how he got his nickname. His wife, Martha told me it was a
contraction of his mother’s term of endearment for him – Chico, little one. His
son Erwell, a drummer, told me that it was the residue of archaic ’40s slang.
"When he was playing a really hot passage, the other musicians would say,
‘That’s really chick, man’," Erwell said. Either way, it’s clear that by the
mid-’40s – after stints in Rangoon and Mussourie – Chic had established himself
as Bombay’s hottest jazz musician. He was ‘in a class by himself’, stated a
review in the now-defunct Evening News of India during that period.
Another newspaper article from the time describes Chic Chocolate’s outfit as
‘Bombay’s topflight band’.
By the time he was leading an 11-piece band at the Taj, Chic and
his family were living in an apartment in Colaba. The flat had one bedroom, but
two pianos – Chic couldn’t resist the urge to buy a second after he found that
Mehboob Studio was selling one for just Rs. 200. The home was always filled with
music: if the five children weren’t practising their scales, the Garrad record
changer was dropping down a stack of records by Basie, Ellington, Ella
Fitzgerald and by Chic’s idol, Louis Armstrong.
Chic took his Armstrong impersonations seriously. "He’d watched
movies like High Society, Hello Dolly and Five Pennies and tried
to copy Louis Armstrong’s playing and singing as closely as possible," his
daughter Ursula recalled. "He followed his every move." Before gigs, he’d
instruct Martha to pack his case with at least half-a-dozen white handkerchiefs
so that he could mop his brow in true Armstrong style.
One morning in 1964, Chic woke up his children at dawn, packed
them into his black Hillman car and drove them to the Taj. They were lined up
outside the lift. After a few minutes, Louis Armstrong, their father’s hero,
emerged in a cloud of suitcases and sidemen. He greeted the children
affectionately and departed for the airport. A few evenings before, the older
children had been taken to meet with Armstrong’s singer, Jewel Brown, and she’d
given them an autographed photograph of herself. They later went to see
Armstrong perform at Shanmukhananda Hall. But all these years later, none of
them is sure whether India’s Louis Armstrong actually had a conversation with
the man he’d admired so long.
Like many Goan musicians of the time, Chic Chocolate indulged
his passion for jazz in the night, but his mornings were spent in the film
studios, enlivening the movies with his swinging arrangements. He first grabbed
the nation’s ears with his brassy work with the composer C. Ramchandra: tunes
like ‘Gore gore’ (from Samadhi, 1950) and ‘Shola jo bhadke’
(Albela, 1951) presaged by a decade the Indo-Jazz fusion encounters of
the ’60s.
He also collaborated with Madan Mohan, who gave the trumpet
player a photograph of himself signed, ‘To my most faithful comrade, Chick –
with all my best wishes’. The family looked forward to Madan Mohan’s visits with
some amusement: his huge car would always run into problems when he tried to
park in the narrow Colaba lane on which they lived. But Chic had no trouble
getting Madan Mohan’s melodies to swing. The eclecticism of the influences he
brought to bear never fails to surprise me. Only a few weeks ago I realised why
an instrumental passage in Chic Chocolate’s arrangement of Madan Mohan’s ‘Ae
dil mujhe bata de’ sounded so familiar: it was a phrase from the Portuguese
fado, Coimbra, that I knew from my Amalia Rodrigues albums.
Chic’s lives as jazz man and as film musician sometimes merged.
Albela actually featured Chic and his band on screen in a song sequence,
dressing them in frilly Latinesque costumes. Chic capitalised on the film’s
success by dressing his band in those costumes for their dance gigs too.
Chic’s career was tragically short. He died in May 1967, aged
51, his end speeded by his Goan fondness for liquor. His casket was borne to the
grave by Bombay’s foremost musicians, including the accordion player Goody
Seervai and the drummer Francis Vaz, and his Selmer trumpet was placed across
his chest. Shortly after, Chetan Anand’s Aakhri Khat hit the screen. The
bluesy song ‘Rut jawan jawan’ featured several close-ups of the Louis
Armstrong of India playing his trumpet solos from the bandstand. Whenever they
missed his presence, Chic’s children would go off to Garrison theatre in the
Colaba military area to commune with their father.
The Majorda sky was blue-black when my interview with Anthony
Gonsalves petered to a close. I knew I had bothered the maestro too much already
and that it was time for supper. As I said my goodbyes, he urged me to eat
another piece of the delicious jackfruit just plucked from his garden and
offered me a tantalising thought. He had a bundle of all his original scores
carefully tucked away in a trunk in the next room, he said, and would like for
nothing more than for them to be performed again. But thus far, no one had been
willing to put up the money for a concert.
Over the last decade, the march of technology and changing
tastes have displaced Goan musicians from the studio. The synthesiser, the drum
machine and the digital sequencer are now in vogue. Besides changing the texture
of Hindi film sounds, these devices allow the music director to be his own
arranger – and play all the instruments too, if he should choose to. As in film
music, so in the body politic. The privileging of individual needs over the
collective good has made Nehru’s theme sound hopelessly off key. As I sped
through the dusk on the back of a motorcycle taxi, my head buzzed with schemes
to persuade Goan businessmen to fund an Anthony Gonsalves concert. It wouldn’t
take much, I’m convinced, to introduce his crownmusic to the inheritors of the
new millennium.
(The research for this article was supported by a fellowship
from the Sarai programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
This article was first published in Seminar magazine, November 2004).