Veteran Jazz singer Louiz Banks retraces the journey of becoming 'The Jingle King of India'

In the 1930s, Pushkar Bahadur Budaprithi, armed with his trumpet, made a beeline for the lowlands of Calcutta from Nepal. Calcutta was where the Western music scene was bubbling with glamour, talent, and money. There, under the advice of his friends, he adopted the more suave name George Banks — two thick monosyllables. Over the years, with his wife Saraswati, he would father 3 boys, 2 girls — the boys would be named Louiz, Peter, and Stephen and the daughters, Ganga and Jamuna.  

The eldest, Louiz, named after the trumpet king Louis Armstrong, picked up jazz, the way one absorbs language growing up. When they moved to the winding hills of Darjeeling, he would sometimes play with his father’s band at the prim Gymkhana Club, while the flounce and wooden soles on the dance floor chafed between cha-cha-cha, the foxtrot, waltz, mambo, samba, rumba, and tango. He was introduced to not just a specific kind of musical performance but also a culture in which that performance was embedded. That culture would soon churn away into obsolescence. Louiz, however, swam with the times.

In 2021, when Louiz would turn 80, the decades he spent between Darjeeling, Calcutta, and Bombay, between the fermenting jazz bands, the dollar-fueled world of ad jingles (‘Humara Bajaj’, Cadbury, Liril), and thick possibilities of Hindi cinema would be archived in his fan-boy biography, Louiz Banks: A Symphony of Love written by Ashis Ghatak.

In the journalistic penchant for grand christenings, he was called “The Godfather Of Indian Jazz”, for not only bringing jazz into the cultural consciousness but also marrying it with other art forms — the fusion bands with Carnatic singer Ramamani and later, Shankar Mahadevan; performing with Zakir Hussain, Ravi Shankar, Niladri Kumar. It was this fusion that his son, the drummer Gino Banks, absorbed from the air, growing up in the 1980s.  

For International Jazz Day (30 April), Louiz Banks has been curating an event at the National Center For Performing Arts (NCPA) for the past decade. This year, there were bands and musicians performing from across India — the youngest was 17, the oldest, Louiz himself, was over 80. In this backstage interview before the curtains rose, with father and son, edited for length and clarity, we retrace Louiz’s journey over the decades.

Tell me about Oscar Peterson. In your interview with Nasreen Munni Kabeer you spoke about listening to him and that being the moment that made you consider jazz seriously. 

Louiz: I was already pursuing jazz in my own way but not very seriously. My dad was a bandleader and he would give me a chance to play with the band when I was only thirteen, about his age (laughs as he points to a young relative ambling around the backstage, who crinkles his nose.)

I liked jazz but was not crazy about it. Then one day my father brought a record of this pianist. When he played it, I was totally blown. In fact I asked him, “Who are the two piano players?” He said there was only one guy. Imagine the virtuosity and artistry! That moment was the turning point. I wanted to play like him.

Was that the reason you moved from the trumpet to the piano?

Louiz: Yes. My dad was a trumpeter and he taught me the trumpet. I used to play both trumpet and piano in the band, and my dad used to exchange roles with me sometimes. I didn’t pursue the trumpet because I couldn’t think of the trumpet.

What do you mean?

Louiz: When you play, you relate to what you are playing on the instrument. But to improvise on the trumpet, I was thinking of the piano. I was going via the piano into the trumpet. I couldn’t think on the trumpet, so I left it.

Gino, did you have any “Oscar Peterson moment”? 

Gino: See, when I was growing up dad was playing fusion. When dad grew up jazz was the popular music of the time. That was the dance music. When you grow up in the music of the time, you don’t have to learn it because it is everywhere. It is a natural influence. Jazz, I had to learn.

The improvisational nature of jazz is that every time you play the same song, it is a different experience. But as a player of jazz, I am assuming you need to build the confidence to be able to then improvise within a structure. When did you get that confidence? 

Louiz:

I was unsure of everything in the beginning. But that made me examine the chords and the scales, having the jazz chart in front of you. But the thing about jazz is the freedom it affords you. There is no wrong note in jazz. Everything is right. You make it right.

Gino: You play a wrong note, and the note you play after it makes it right.

Louiz: Dissonance is allowed in jazz. You want to clash C and C# — that is allowed. It is how you play it and connect it to the chords. All that I found exciting. Because in pop music I was playing the same thing over and over again in the same way. People don’t like it if you play it differently. When I formed my band in Calcutta at the Blue Fox Restaurant in the early 70s, I only wanted jazz musicians. Over there, because it was a club and people wanted to dance. So, I had to play pop music. But I played it in my own way, infused jazz into it by changing the harmony structure.

Pop music is simple — simple chords played in a straightforward way. Jazz is more complex. But people didn’t realise I was doing this, because for them they just wanted to hear the pop tune. Most of the jazz we played was straight ahead jazz — jazz of the swing era, not very complex. I couldn’t get that complexity into what we were playing because of the club environment. That only happened when I heard Ramamani, this Carnatic singer from the South. She was giving a concert in Bombay with the Karnataka College of Percussion backing her. I was totally blown by the improvisation.

What are the continuities between something as modern as jazz and something as ancient and Indian classical music? Both have improvisation at its heart. 

Louiz: But it is improvisation within a scale in Indian classical music. So if you are using a Yaman scale, you stay with that through the composition. Jazz is full of different progressions, you can go wherever you want to go. But both have a freedom of improvisation. I approached Ramamani and told her I wanted to combine our music. She was very open-minded and excited. We got together, I wrote some tunes, presented it to her, noting where I wanted her to come in and where the breakways to jazz would happen. It worked out so well we got a European tour. In Europe they were blown away by us, seeing artists blending music like that. We were playing hardcore jazz and people seeing this lady in Kanjeevaram sari and big bindi in the front of the stage singing, did not know what they were seeing. We had sold out concerts. That was my foray into fusion, forming Sangam. After that, I formed Silk with Shankar Mahadevan. The calibre of music we produced with various artists at that time was simply great.

Can you paint me a picture of how RD Burman discovered you? 

He discovered me in Calcutta while I was playing at the Blue Fox. Somebody came in — I didn’t then know who it was. When I finished, there was applause and a waiter came and said, “That sahib wants to speak to you?” I asked the waiter who it was, and he told me he was RD Burman, this famous music director from Bombay. The name also didn’t register, I was in my own world, and did not know anything about the Bombay film world.

RD Burman told me that it just so happened that he is working on a film where the hero is playing the piano — Mukti (1977) — and he suddenly got the idea that I should play all the piano pieces. So I moved to Bombay, and spent a week recording. He gave me the freedom to play on my own after giving me a sense of the mood. I loved the way he thought — very open-minded. I became part of his inner circle. Eventually, his music was in decline. Other composers like Bappi Lahiri came in and I played for them.  

Film music cooled down a bit, until one fine day someone from the advertising world came by asking if I could compose a jazzy track for a commercial. This was a new thing for me because you have to compose a piece for 20-30 seconds but it should feel complete. I learned the game along the way. I got other gigs and soon I was flooded with offers. I became “The Jingle King”, making jingles everyday, making a lot of money also. (laughs)

Gino: From a session musician to composing jingles and then background scores — that was the transition for dad. He became a composer from a side musician. But there was no computer doing the composing so everyone was at the top of their game. No PR agent, no marketing.

Louiz: I made over 10,000 jingles!

Gino: He used to do 2-3 jingles a day. There were days when I would not see him. He used to leave at 8 am and come by 1-2 am.

Louiz: Lesle Lewis was my assistant in those days. He would work on something in another studio while I was finishing another jingle.

Gino: He is the jingle musician tree. Karl Peter was the bass player and Ranjit Barot was the drum programmer. When Lesle left, Ehsaan Noorani joined. There is another generation now playing with him.

Louiz: That is why they call me the godfather! (laughs)

What about your relationship to film music? At least with respect to jazz, Bombay Velvet is a cultural touchstone…

Gino: I played on that album. They recorded the whole album in Prague and then (composer) Amit Trivedi called me and felt the jazz drum was too European. They needed more oomph for the Indian audience so I re-played for 7 songs.

What do you mean by oomph? 

Gino:  See, it was authentic to the style but was too artsy and esoteric. Let’s just say European food is a lot blander than Indian food. (laughs)

Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at  prathyush.substack.com .

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