A foxtrot called Taj Mahal

By Naresh Fernandes Editor’s Note: The story of Bombay’s early jazz age now gets a worthy chronicler. Naresh Fernandes travels from the American South to Shanghai, from Calcutta to Bombay to tell a fascinating story of race, blues and rhythms. Here is the story of one of the earliest jazz records that could be called “made in India.” Except was it about a tomb in Agra or a hotel in Bombay? Read this excerpt from Taj Mahal Foxtrot (Roli Books). In April 1936, shortly after Leon Abbey had finished his first season at the Taj, the burly pianist Teddy Weatherford joined Crickett Smith and his Symphonians in a recording studio in Bombay to make a date with history. Weatherford was already a celebrity. He had left the US for Shanghai in 1926 and spent the decade playing all over East Asia. “Stiff-necked Britishers and Old China hands from Bombay to the Yellow River swore by his music,” wrote the African-American poet  Langston Hughes, who had befriended Weatherford in China. “A big, genial, dark man, something of a clown, Teddy could walk into almost any public place in the Orient and folks would break into applause.” He’d come a long way from his hardscrabble childhood in the coal-mining town of Bluefield, Virginia. Weatherford had burst into the spotlight in the early 1920s with the Jimmy Wade orchestra in Chicago. In 1925, he performed alongside Louis Armstrong in the Erskine Tate Vendome Theatre Orchestra. Weatherford’s playing displayed “a strong rhythmic style, caught halfway between its ragtime ancestry and the later ‘trumpet piano style’”, observed the critic Gunther Schuller, and he was among the formative influences on several young pianists, especially the rising star Earl Hines. Weatherford had departed for China with Jack Carter’s band just as his popularity was growing, leaving behind a trail of stories about his abundant talents. [caption id=“attachment_210586” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Crickett Smith and his Symphonians. Courtesy: tajmahalfoxtrot.com”]  [/caption] For Crickett Smith, whose ensemble had taken Abbey’s place on the Taj bandstand after the violinist’s men had fled the Bombay summer, having Weatherford on the record guaranteed a wider audience. The session had been set up by the British gramophone label Rex,founded three years earlier. Its discs bore the legend “Hear What You Like—When You Like”. Presumably in an attempt to give listeners in the expanding Indian market the opportunity to hear a disc made by musicians they could see performing in their own city, Rex got Smith and his boys to record a foxtrot called “Taj Mahal”, the first “hot” tune with roots firmly planted in the subcontinent. To be sure, “Taj Mahal” wasn’t the first jazzy record made in India. That honour had already been earned ten years earlier by Lequime’s Grand Hotel Orchestra, a Calcutta outfit led by a Canadian trumpet player named Jimmy Lequime. They cut a record with the tune “The House Where the Shutters Are Green” on one side and “Soho Blues” on the other, both composed by members of his peripatetic band. Like Lequime’s record, “Taj Mahal” didn’t feature any Indian musicians. But the record was nonetheless an important step towards the domestication of jazz in the subcontinent. The melody and lyrics of “Taj Mahal” had been composed by Mena Silas, a Baghdadi Jew whose family had lived in Bombay for at least a generation, if not longer. By 1935, two of his productions, Queen of Hearts and The Isle of Dreams, had been performed by the Bombay Amateur Dramatic Club. They didn’t lack ambition. The Isle of Dreams, for instance, was a musical comedy about the king of a cannibal island who also owns a restaurant in London. It had a cast of 50 and put Ken Mac’s Bohemians in the orchestra pit of the Royal Opera House. But Silas was unhappy trying to build his dreams with the part-time actors of the Bombay  stage. “The lack of talent in Bombay—anyone who has tried to stage a show knows how difficult it is even to get a chorus together—makes it impossible for me to stage shows on the scale I wish,” he told a reporter. Instead, he formed an orchestra of ten musicians to perform his own compositions. His vocalist was Signe Rintala, a Finnish woman who sang in 25 languages. Like the minstrelsy performer Dave Carson fifty years earlier, Silas had a talent for writing topical tunes. In 1929, as sound was being introduced into the movies, he celebrated with “Talkies the Whole of the Day”. In 1944, when urgency about protecting war-time secrets was intense, he cautioned, “Don’t Be a Talkie”. Silas was still making music in Bombay in 1948, when he complained to The Illustrated Weekly of India that dance-music composers in India had fewer chances of making it big than their counterparts in New York or London. Despite Silas’ reservations about his prospects, “Taj Mahal” was probably more influential than he recognised. In a small way, the tune helped shake the notion that jazz songs necessarily had to stomp through the Savoy in Harlem and that being blue was the prerogative of the residents of St Louis. “Taj Mahal” begins gently enough, with a swirl of horns and piano trills, but Creighton Thompson’s deep baritone suddenly bubbles over, transforming it into a faux Negro spiritual. “Where dome and minaret outline the sky/in the shadow of the golden moon/ there the tropic breeze softly sights/ as you hear the lovers croon,” Thompson sings, the lyric phrased ambiguously enough to make the listener wonder whether it refers to the magnificent marble tomb in Agra or the hotel in which Smith and the Symphonians were employed. Three solos follow— Weatherford demonstrates the stride piano stylings that had made him so influential in the US, Roy Butler’s tenor saxophone has its turn and Crickett Smith’s muted trumpet brings the tune to a satisfying conclusion. The performances gave a small sense of the musicians’ capabilities, but the record wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a work of genius. The song had obviously been made “to please the Taj management”, Jehangir Dalal wrote several years later in the short-lived Bombay jazz magazine, Blue Rhythm. “Even though the tune in itself isn’t too bad, the lyrics leave much to be desired.” In Dalal’s view, Creighton Thompson —“actually… a very fine singer”—made the [recording] date sound like “rather a tongue-in-cheek affair”. Though “Taj Mahal” isn’t among Weatherford’s finest works, it isn’t a mere curiosity either. It represents a fascinating convergence of journeys, featuring musicians who were born in places as distant as the Deep South of the US and Cuba, and who had meandered through Sao Paulo, Spain and Surabaya before eventually coming together in Bombay. In this jazz adventure, Paris proved an unlikely staging ground. While colonial Bombay’s tastes in fashion and literature mirrored trends in London, its appreciation for jazz echoed an explosion that was resounding through the French capital. “There is nothing in London to compare with the Rue Fontaine, littered as it is with its boîtes de nuits standing in double file on both sides of the road,” declared Dosoo Karaka, who frequently escaped Oxford to explore the bohemian side of Paris. “Each little place, with its minute dance floor…is packed out night after night.” It was here, in Montmartre, that one of the city’s main attractions could be found: music—“not ethereal classical music which produces pure thought, but the music of a new school of earthy composers who concentrated on the beat and the rhythm, which when absorbed, produced the impure urge”. At Chez Florence, Karaka drank in a performance by Nina Mae McKinney, the “black Garbo” who had appeared with Paul Robeson in the film Sanders of the River. “She went straight to the dais and began to sing a soft Harlem melody, while the whole boîte listened to her in silent adoration,” the young man recalled. He also found himself drawn to the Melody Bar, where a trumpet player urged him to “get hot, maan, get hot”. Melody’s owners were from the Antilles and Martinique  and the establishment was among the highlights of any visitor’s Montmartre tour. “The later you went, the more maddening was the music,” Karaka wrote. “Negro bands which played straight rhythm took time to warm up, but once the place became full, they hit the roof with the mad music they beat out. It was difficult for anyone other than a paralytic to keep still.”