All, These are Madhav Chari's thoughts on Naresh Fernandes' article -- My name is Anthony Gonsalves; and to be clear -- more in a jazz vein. Madhav has a very cordial relationship with Naresh Fernandes. I could not get Naresh's email since Madhav is busy and I wanted to get this out quickly. Gabe Menezes, if you have it do please pass this on to Naresh, if its need be.
Venantius J Pinto Dear VJP, First I want to tell Naresh that his repeated efforts at promoting the knowledge of Indian musicians who are playing in idioms that are in some sense "located" in the west (point of origin for example) is extremely commendable. This sort of research and writing should continue for many reasons, one most important is that we need to know ourselves, our "selves" .... including the efforts on the part of musicians who decided to take on musical challenges, some outside the norm, some just because the challenge was worth it to them (not just money). However I would like to point out something that is never written in the press regarding musicians of Goan descent. There has been NO Goan, east Indian or Mumbai born musician EVER of the calibre of Adrian D'Souza in jazz music: this is my informed and not so humble opinion. Not even Dizzy Reece, not anyone I have heard personally or on recordings: many of them do not really "swing hard" to use a jazz musician's language ... Adrian works when he gets to NYC a couple of times a year: I don't have the same musical aesthetics as Adrian. My own musical influences have strong roots based in the African spirits of the music along with contemporary classical music and a mystical outlook drawn from the great Indian religous traditions that informs my music on a day to day level, and musically I come from a Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Bird and Miles jazz aesthetic. Be that as it may, I have played with the best jazz drummers on this planet including Max Roach and Ed Thigpen, I hung out with Wynton Marsalis just before I left the US and know what a master musician is capable of doing, and based on that information and my own extensive teaching experience from 5 year old kids to corporates at Tata Consultacy Services I can accurately assess what Adrian can do. He has a lot of growth still in him, and he needs to regularly play with musicians who can routinely push him way beyond his comfort zone, like myself who inspires him every time we play together. Please take a moment to understand why is it that outside of India most of these musicians Naresh talks about do not get much work: truth is that they are not good enough to compete with graduates from Juilliard. You want to be a working classical pianist or violinist playing big venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, you need to play as well as (or at least you cannot sound weak compared to) people from Moscow like Maxim Vengerov (violinist) or Evgeny Kissin (pianist, one of my favorites) and that is extremely difficult. These working musicians are so far gifted way beyond even the Juilliard faculty members that it boggles the mind. And hard as it may seem, they are on a musical level not as good as the Russians of yesteryear like Sviatoslav Richter ... ask serious classical buffs in New York and elsewhere. Of course fate counts, connections help but a sustained career cannot happen with musicians who do not make the cut. You want to be a classical composer you need to know not just basic classical orchestration and works like Brahms, Wagner, Schumann and the obvious ones like Beethoven and Bach, but you need to understand the contemporary philosophy of classical music: that means you need to understand Stravinsky, Schoenberg (both before 1930s), Varese, the more conceptual work of Stockhausen, Boulez and John Cage (including his work with his partner Merce Cunningham) ... in fact you need to know what happened to classical music post romantic era in the 20th century, which sadly most composers from India do not know about (even if they got degress from the west). I listened to some of the rubbish that Vanraj Bhatia had written (released on Music Today on seasons or elements, I can't remember the exact titles), and if he really knew modern classical music he would never have had that "bad taste" and kitsch beyond kitsch ... please reflect on that .... even if one did something commercial there would be a hint of something interesting there, which there is NOT: maybe one really did not internalize this aesthetic and thought process of contemporary western classical music: that is also necessary if one wants to go deep into a music form. Why don't you do a survey Naresh and find out how much actual contemporary classical music these people know? I suspect very very little. That also says it all. You want to be a jazz musician you have to reckon with the presence of Wynton, Joe Lovano, Branford, Fred Hersch, Jeff "Tain" Watts, Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor .... no matter how "creative" and "ethnically true" a musician is they still have to be great musicians if it has to mean something in the musical domain (and no I do not believe either post modernists or Marxists that social construction of music is the main reason for a musician's consciousness) and most of the jazz recordings I have heard from Naresh except for Teddy Weatherford (who is a black American anyway) are mediocre by any decent contemporary New York standard, forget the New York of Monk, Bird, Trane, Rollins, Ornette, Miles of the late 50s and 60s, forget the New York of Duke, Tatum and Louis Armstrong: even by today's standards our Indians suck. Even Teddy missed the bus I feel because he missed the crucial developments in music in the late 20s and 30s: Art Tatum came to New York in 1930s and everything in jazz got screwed up forever (especially for piano players), Duke Ellington is starting to rewrite the way an orchestra is organized as a musical entity .... suddenly it was not enough to be just technically good or just a normal virtuoso, one needed even more abilities, and most of them were musical not merely technical. When Bird comes to the scene in the 1940s after his work in Kansas, again there is a change. Jazz ran out of hordes of geniuses in the 60s just like classical music ran out of geniuses after Stravinsky and Schoenberg ... creativity finds other pathways I believe, however that is the legacy that haunts us till today and we need to make sense of that, and not all of us can be geniuses. So I applaud the telling of the story of these musicians because we also come from them, but I'd like more informed viewpoints that state that musicians like Adrian are better than almost all their predecessors (and I can qualify it in multiple ways). I'd like to leave you both with two stories: one of the so called great Braz Gonsalves in the city of Toronto, hardly a jazz capital even in North America, nothing compared to Washington DC, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago or Boston, forget San Francisco and New York. My own experience in Toronto confirmed that the Toronto jazz music scene is composed of anal Canadians who are not so talented in the best sense of the word (black and white jazz musicians were hardly playing together, and this was in 2002 in the so called liberal kinder gentler Canada), thus not necessarily conducive to great artistic creative thought. According to George Gallus (a Hungarian immigrant to the Canadian jazz scene who is married to Jean Mac an anglo Indian jazz singer of the 1960s and 70s who played a lot in Delhi in the late 60s / early 70s), the great Braz was too intimidated to sit in and play in front of Kirk Macdonald (local tenor sax player in Toronto, hardly anyone you could compare to Branford Marsalis). This story was personally told to me by both of them. I somehow believe them ..... So all this exaggeration about Braz being the "John Coltrane" of India among certain music lovers within India is a little hard to take especially when there are musicians like myself and Adrian who are serious students of the music of John Coltrane ..... to make such a comment one needs to know what Coltrane did, and his contribution was humungous. Branford Marsalis is leading the best working jazz group today, leading perhaps the best working jazz group since the great quintet of Miles Davis in the 1960s and the John Coltrane Quartet (lasted till 1965) (the only other working group today that is as good musically as Branford's is the trio of Keith Jarrett with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock) (I can easily qualify that). Even Branford as a player would not put himself in any sort of category that compares him to Coltrane or Sonny Rollins ... he acknowledges their genius and recognizes that they are part of his consciousness and have crucially contributed to the way he hears the music. The second story was related to me by a source in the music industry in India: I have to verify the explicit details, but it is important for those who are from India who listen to jazz music. According to my source, he had looked up a Down Beat magazine in the late 1970s (Down Beat is a jazz magazine), and the reviewer from the US had reviewed Jazz Yatra (today it is called Jazz Utsav) and had the chance to review a jazz group led by Mr Louis Banks (Braz may have been the saxophone player in that group, I am not sure). His assessment of the group was that the quality of musicianship was comparable to an average college jazz band in the US, nothing special at all. I will take this opportunity to go on written record confirming that based on my musical experience in New York and elsewhere, Louiz Banks is comparable to a college level jazz piano player in the US: nothing more. There are many 20 year olds in the city of New York who can vastly outplay him. I need to point out that we need to also be frank with ourselves ... if we are then we are sure to grow .... otherwise we fall into yet another mythic creation of the great India shining model: past, present and future, which neglects to tell the full truth about many facets of Indian culture, some facets that are in their own way quite limiting either in thought or quality. The fact that there is someone of Adrian's capability only means that the scene, and India itself (the India of today, not of yesteryear) has an ability to create and sustain this talent even if there is only one club in Mumbai that features him, and he only plays a few purely jazz gigs every year within India ... he is still practicing and that is all good ... In terms of harmonic knowledge, most of these musicians of yesteryear were not even as good as Floyd Fernandes or Harmeet Manseta (local jazz and blues musicians currently in Mumbai) ... when do we get to hear that story, if at all?? How many musicians within the Indian jazz context really knew or know what John Coltrane or Charlie Parker did? At the very least that is the absolute minimum to understand jazz if one is playing it today. Please understand that the crucial contributions of musicians like Charlie Parker (Bird) happened before 1955, John Coltrane before 1967: no Indian jazz musician I have heard who performed till the late 1970s including Braz or the Louis Banks has any deep understanding of the work of Bird, forget Trane. Do you want me to be explicit about this? Why is it important that Chic Chocolate mopped his brow with a towel imitating his hero Louis Armstrong? Is it for the sake of a story and this is somehow a newsworthy item for narration simultaneously with a feeling of great nostalgia for the golden era which apparently existed? The crucial question to ask from a musical viewpoint is: did he really play at a level where musicians in New York would sit up and notice? After all if one writes about musicians, I believe one should also write about the music itself, and that would require the writer to have a deeper knowledge of the music (cultural, emotional, AND structural), especially the music of the greats like Lester Young, Armstrong, Duke, Bird, Trane, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Monk: this has not come through in any of the writings of Naresh that I have read. If you do not really understand what these great musicians were doing you cannot adequately comment or even tell a history of jazz music within India: you do not need to have intricate specialized knowledge that a musician has, but you still need to be able to recognize specific musical patterns within western musical idioms, you need to be able to recognize how these musicians play in terms of quality and aesthetic, their specific emotional content, even on a rudimentary level. My father who is not a trained musician, but an avid listener of jazz, can make out the stark difference (especially in the realm of emotional content) between the jazz greats I mentioned and almost all our Indian musicians. To me a nice story is not enough: it is really not the full story. Again understand that I am not a harbinger of doom, but in the interest of providing a balance to a story viewpoint it is crucial that we know how we stand vis a vis the west in musical idioms that they have nurtured in the last 200 years ... I leave you with one more thought: if there was that much interchange in Mumbai or other cultural centers like Kolkata, how come one crucial point of jazz music was missed by almost all Hindustani and carnatic musicians who do fusion and jazz musicians from the Mumbai or urban Indian consciousness: how to deal with chaos. Jazz music perhaps is one of the most expressive modern music forms that brings in a sense of organised chaos into the music: it exploits the tension between chaos and organisation (and one needs to know a lot of organisation of sound to make this chaos work for you). These Indian musicians (both jazz and Indian classical) still do fusion gigs keeping strong melodic forms (melodies that are hummable / singable, and when they do fusion some of these melodies are quite kitsch), they still do not have the ability to be in chaos and chaos is what their life is about in terms of the energy of the city of Mumbai. Walk in that city and you get an energy, the chaos communicates to you, the music does not even have a parallel to that .... that is truly pathetic ... --Madhav Chari (Madhav Chari is a jazz pianist currently living in Chennai, India)