In recent years, it has often been the fashion, among the Older and Wiser set, to dismiss the social and cultural experiments of the 1960s as a momentary bout of idealism and excess, as if by now we’ve all presumably grown up. But from the vantage of these ever postmodern times, when so much is contrived for the sake of cleverness and furthering careers, the products of that era seem to radiate a kind of innocence in their authenticity. No matter where the explorers themselves ended up -- some fell silent, some persisted in the paths initially carved out -- the implications of their work are still being felt.

The confluence of quality and new ideas, the sheer amount of brilliant music produced in any given year, and the high level of acceptance for pure artistry made the first half of the last century a time to cherish and envy. Musicians of this generation were not only expressive artists of rare talent, but also schooled virtuosos. They had inquisitive minds and could execute whatever they imagined -- playing an earthy blues with feeling and moving effortlessly into a piece in 7/4 time with complex harmonies and intricate interplay. Their creative skills seemed unending and their feeling so natural. Anything was, indeed, possible. And these artists had the mettle to prove it. What was business as usual at Taj Mahal appears now as a pantheon of major musical achievements.

The early 1930s were a fertile time in jazz, not only because there was such an extensive pool of exceptional talent, but also because artists were taking the music in so many directions. Bombay, in its eclectic open-mindedness, was the benchmark for much of this activity.

While introducing the session entitled, ‘All That Jazz in Bombay and Karachi’, Naresh Fernandes presented music to the audience that captured the spirit of true jazz improvisation and the youthful vitality that epitomised the soul of the times. Fernandes is a seasoned journalist whose career spans between Time Out India and The Wall Street Journal, USA. He is the co-author of Bombay Then and Mumbai Now and the co-editor of Yeh Hai Bombay, Meri Jaan together with Jerry Pinto.

During the hour-long session, Fernandes went on to enlighten the avid listeners with the information that the very first jazz band came into limelight in 1926, giving way to ‘Taj Mahal Foxtrot’ -- the name given to the first Indian jazz track. However, Karachi got the first jazz band in 1930. "In the 1930s, a band called Correa’s Optimists became increasingly popular in Karachi, performing in various city ballrooms, and around Partition in 1947, there were already 60 jazz bands playing in Bombay", he added. In an advertisement that Fernandes ran as a slide, members of Correa’s Optimists Swing Band, established in 1928 on Napier Street in Karachi, could be seen with trumpets, saxophone, violins, cello and drums.

Musicians from both Pakistan and India would copy western musicians down to renaming themselves after their western mentors and role models, like Jazzy Joe and Rudy Cotton whose actual name was Cowasji Khatau. By the time Independence finally arrived, swing had become so popular that the highlight of the banquet at the Karachi Club on August 15, 1947, to toast Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a performance by the Anglo-Indian bandleader, Ken Mac.

Mac had been flown in from Bombay on a special Tata Airlines plane. As the evening proceeded, Jinnah asked the band to play Paul Robeson’s ‘The End’, a tune he used to hum when he performed his weekly Thursday ritual of visiting the grave of his wife Ruttie in the Khoja cemetery in Bombay’s Mazagaon district. As a mark of respect to Jinnah, Ken Mac sang the tune himself.

But the 1940s were a tough time for jazz bands. "The influx of cinema music was making it hard for the bands to play pure jazz, and often had to collaborate with classical music directors to make a film composition. As sound became sophisticated, there was an orchestra needed for film music." Film composers of those times, such as Kalyanji Anandji, Shankar Jaikishen and O P Nayyer incorporated jazz into film music. Fernandes showed a clip from Kishore Kumar’s ‘Eina Mina Dika’ as a sampler. Many other songs of the 1950s through the 1970s Bollywood, such as ‘Aao huzoor tum ko’ by Asha Bhonsle, ‘Pukarta chala hoon mein’ by Rafi, and ‘Chura liya hai tum ne’ by Asha are a good example of jazz’s impact on film music. "There was an absurd situation in the studio: there were these Hindu music composers, Muslim lyricists and Christian musicians, and they often disagreed. But within the studio, they would rise beyond all boundaries and think only about the art itself."

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In what can be labelled as a walk down memory lane, Fernandes further enthralled the audience by pontificating on the US diplomatic policy: "Despite the electrical aggravations, for the US State Department, which had organised the Brubeck tour, it had been using jazz as a Cold War weapon since 1956, when Dwight D Eisenhower used his President’s Emergency Fund to send bebop trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, on a tour of West Asia -- to win the hearts and minds of the elite in many of Asian and African countries. As America’s only home-grown art form, jazz didn’t just embody the country’s immense creativity; it also allowed Washington to present Afro-American musicians as goodwill ambassadors -- a move designed to convince people in the Third World that racial segregation laws in the US weren’t restrictive as many believed they were.

The year before the US set Gillespie free on the world, it started using jazz as a propaganda tool on the radio. By the time he roared into prominence, the saxophonist…had been developing his inimitable big sound for over…years. Full of exuberance and a fierce romanticism, his husky-voiced horn has carried him throughout a diverse itinerary.

"Gillespie could be seen in a photograph charming the snakes in Sindh; Charlie Parker aka Bird stayed at Faletti’s in Lahore; and Duke Ellington visited India among many others." In another clip presented on the projection screen, Lahore-based Sachal Orchestra could be heard playing a classical rendition of a 1959 jazz track by Dave Brubeck called, ‘Take Five’. "The clip, when it came out, had gone viral over the net," said Fernandes, "but seriously, they have been well-received internationally because for the western audience, it was something exotic to see people in Pathan clothes play jazz."

The last half of the session culminated in a conversation between Naresh Fernandes and Leon Menezes, former member of the band, ‘The Incrowd’ that used to play in what were "Karachi’s good ol’ bad ol’ days". He quipped that Karachi’s music was fed mostly by it being played live. "There was a lot of live music in our nightclubs and ballrooms. Unlike India, not too many steamships came to Karachi, so hardly any musician stayed here and influence the local music. We used to listen to the radio and learn to play from there because not many households had gramophones either. But in our posh Metropole Hotel, we did have a ballroom with a sliding stage that was electronically-operated."

He reminisced about the Bhutto era when jazz saw its heyday in Pakistan. "Jazz music had taken hold in Goa because people there had already been introduced to European music at Parish schools set up by the Portuguese colonisers." Jazz, then, was their route into an international sphere of music, and also the means by which they were able to go back and expand their own cultural roots. The Chic Chocolate Band tenor invigorated the ensembles to create a music that was recognisable in its specific folk elements -- using quena, charango, bandoneon, Indian harp, and drums.

So where has jazz been in the many years since? For a while, the jazz musicians continued mining the fertile terrain of their sources, but by these late 1970s the music began to suffer from their success. Over the next decade, they released a string of albums that were nearly generic in their soporific comfort -- smooth jazz, easy listening, over produced.