This article in Man's World of July 2003 appeared in Goanet at that time followed by a lively discussion.
It's been 5 years since that time and thought that it would happily transport some new readers down memory lane. Part II follows soon. Roland. Chris & Lorna - Love and Longing in Mumbai's Jazz Age by Naresh Fernandes - July 2003 For over five decades, well into the late 1960s before prohibition, taxation and rock-and-roll killed it, Mumbai boasted of one of the most vibrant jazz scenes in the world, outside of the US. On Churchgate Street, stretching from the Marine Drive sea front all the way up to Flora Fountain the sound of jazz spilled out through the doors of packed night clubs like Ambassador, Napoli, The Talk of the Town, Gaylord's, Ritz, Little Hut, Bistro and Volga. Not to speak of the Rendezvous at the Taj. The legendary pianist and composer Dave Brubeck was impressed enough by the local musicians to attempt to make some recordings during one of his visits. Set against this backdrop is the tragic love affair of tenor saxophonist and band leader Chris Perry and singer Lorna Cordeiro. Naresh Fernandes tells their story for the first time. --------- Their eyes give it away. Chris Perry wears a slick black jacket, the sleeves of his crisp white shirt revealing the glint of dark cuff links. His fingers clasp a gleaming tenor saxophone with a lover's gentleness. Arms crossed coquettishly above her waist, Lorna Cordeiro is chic in a bouffant and a form-fitting gown that shows a flash of ankle. They stare into each other's eyes, mesmerised. Behind them looms a giant camera aperture borrowed from the opening sequence of the Bond films. You couldn't miss the poster as you sauntered down Jamshetji Tata Road in downtown Bombay. It hung outside the Astoria Hotel, across the street from the octagonal Art Deco turret of Eros cinema, inviting the city to Chris and Lorna's daily shows at the Venice nightclub. It was 1971. India was savouring its newfound place on the world's stage. The country's armed forces had decisively liberated Bangladesh and the idealism of Independence had welled up again. India's middle classes were capturing their polyester memories on Agfa Click IIIs that cost 46.50 rupees (taxes extra), aspiring to the lifestyles of "The Jet Set Air Hostesses" described in The Illustrated Weekly of India (price: 85 paise), and being encouraged by newspaper ads to "Go gay with Gaylord fine filter cigarettes". As the City of Gold bubbled through its jazz age, Lorna and Chris enthralled Bombay with their shows at Venice each night. Remo Fernandes, who would go on to become the first Indian pop musician to record an album of original English-language tunes, was among those locked in the spell. "Two artists sometimes ignite a creative chemistry in each other which goes beyond all logical explanation. Mere mortals can only look and listen in awe," he rhapsodised. "In such duos, one plus one does not make two. It makes a number so immeasurable, it defies all laws of calculus." But the sparks that flew at Venice gradually built into a roaring conflagration. As Remo put it: "Hyper-intense, high-temperament artistic relationships often end in emotional disaster, like two comets when they steer too dangerously close. Chris's and Lorna's, as we all know, was no exception." Like the myths about the city in which they soared to fame, the tale of Chris and Lorna has gained so much in the re-telling it's sometimes difficult to thresh the apocrypha from the actual. Thirty years after the two stopped performing together, old-time musicians in the bylanes of Dhobi Talao and Bandra still beg anonymity as they reminisce in sad whispers. "He was shameless. He left his wife and three small children for that girl." "Chris and Lorna were in love. When they fought, they became mortal enemies. He destroyed her and he destroyed himself." "She was very good singer. Beyond that, she was nothing. She got her break with Chris Perry. He made contract with her. She couldn't sing without his permission. She had no brains, so she signed. Then he went back to his wife." "He didn't let her perform with anyone else. He threatened to break the legs of one Hindu fellow who tried to get her to sing with him." "She hit the bottle, men. She became an alcoholic and just disappeared." Chris Perry who was born Pereira died on January 25, 2002, his last years hobbled by Parkinson's disease. Lorna has refused to recount her version of events for publication. But the fidelity of her contralto booming out of our speakers, embroidered with Chris's perfectly crafted sax filigrees, speaks its own truth. Ronnie Monserrate was 19 when he began to play Sunday gigs at Venice with the Chris Perry band, sitting in for the regular pianist. Venice had a reputation. It was the jazzman's jazz haunt, the rendezvous for musicians from around the country and occasionally from around the world. Dave Brubeck swung by when he visited Bombay in 1958, as Duke Ellington had when his band set out on their famous world tour of 1963. As Ronnie tells it, the dapper Chris Perry was the musician's musician: "He had perfect pitch. He was an arranger, a composer, a player." Chris played both trumpet and saxophone, sometimes switching from one to the other mid-tune, a feat that required elaborate lip control. His trumpet tone was broad and true. He didn't have flashy technique, but the notes he coaxed out of his horn had a mellowness that kept the fans coming back night after night. Chris was 43 at the time, Lorna was 25. No one seems quite sure exactly how they met, but everyone's agreed that he groomed her into one of the Bombay's finest crooners. One version maintains that Lorna got her break when still in school, after she won the Connie Francis soundalike competition at Metro cinema. This prompted a musician named Raymond Albuqerque to invite her to sing in his show at the Bandra Fair. Her rendition of Underneath the Mango Tree got the crowds so fired up that Chris Perry, already an established performer, went to her home to audition her. She was just 16 when she joined Perry's band. A vocalist in the Shirley Bassey mould, Lorna belted out every tune like it was her last time on stage. "She had a lot of black feel," is how Ronnie describes her performances. "You could see the intensity when she was on stage. She'd give it her best, every time. She was like a magnet. You couldn't help but be attracted to her when she was on stage. And with Chris Perry band by her side, it was like magic happening. There was incredible attraction. There was a lot of love in the interaction. It was apparent in their body language. They brought out the best in each other. They'd look into each other's eyes and their understanding was so great that there'd be spontaneous combustion." Offstage, though, things could get awkward. Any man attempting to talk to Lorna was liable to get a taste of Perry's famously volatile fists. During breaks, the musicians would sit around their table, absolutely silent. "They were jolly people but they were afraid to laugh around Chris," Ronnie says. Ronnie was the only exception, perhaps because his youth made him seem unthreatening. Two decades later, he'd find opportunity to call in that bond of trust. Venice was around the corner from Bombay's swinging jazz strip, Churchgate Street (now Veer Nariman Road). Pianists, trios and quartets were to be heard all the way down the 200-metre thoroughfare as it led off from Churchgate station to the Arabian Sea. First came Berry's, with tandoori butter chicken that was the stuff of Bombay legend and accomplished piano-fronted groups led by Dorothy Jones and Stanley Pinto. Across the fence was Bombelli's, named after its Swiss owner, where a trio held sway as ad men sipped cappuccinos. Then came the Ambassador, where Toni Pinto's quintet encapsulated Bombay's diversity: the group had two Jews a singer named Ephrim Elias and drummer Abie Cohen, an Anglo-Indian tenor saxophonist named Norman Mobsby, and, in addition to Pinto, another Goan, the bassist Clement Furtado. Pinto's kingdom was named the Other Room, so called because after the rich and famous had finished drinking at the bar, they'd say, "Let's go to the other room." He ruled for 16 years from 1958, his sharply dressed group spinning out hard-driving bop and light classics, and playing back-up for cabarets and visiting acrobats, magicians and flamenco dancers. The Ambassador was owned by the cigar-chomping Jack Voyantzis, an ebullient Greek who was assisted by his brother, Socrates. The siblings had started their subcontinental journey in Rangoon, opened a café in Delhi, and finally found their way to Bombay, where they transformed a hotel known as the Argentinian into the Ambassador. The cream of Bombay society turned out to catch Toni's tightly-rehearsed band. Toni remembers once looking up from his piano to see three of the city's leading editors appreciatively tapping their feet: Rusi Karanjia, editor of the left-wing tabloid Blitz, D F Karaka, editor of the rival Current, and Frank Moraes, editor of the Indian Express, with his American girlfriend. Another time, as the band was going through its routine, Toni realised that someone from the back of the room was playing along on a trumpet. It turned out to be American hornman Eddie Calvert. "He came for dinner one night even though he was staying at the Ritz," Toni says, and he asked his drummer, Bobby Hadrian, to go back and get his instrument. Calvert and Toni's band jammed for an hour, playing the tunes the American had made famous: Cherry Pink, Begin the Beguine, Wonderland by Night. Elsewhere on Churchgate Street, music spilled out through the doors of the Napoli, The Talk of the Town and Gaylord's. Opposite Venice, there was jazz at the Ritz, while at the Little Hut, Neville Thomas led a group calling itself Three Guys and a Doll. Past Flora Fountain stood Bistro and Volga, home to a quartet led by the grandfatherly baritone saxophonist Hecke Kingdom. Dave Brubeck was impressed enough by the local musicians to attempt to make some recordings with them during his visit. But Bombay defeated him. He later recounted the episode to an interviewer: "The current fluctuated in Bombay in those days and so the tape would speed up and slow down. Like, when you were shaving, the speed of the motor would go up and down. It ruined one of my favourite tapes I've ever made." Another visiting jazzman, the pianist Hampton Hawes, was overwhelmed by problems that were rather more basic. "Bombay turned me around," he wrote. "I'd never seen poverty before." Art, he decided, was irrelevant amidst the gnawing deprivation. "Here I was thinking about making a big splash, a hit record, going home a hero, and I'm walking the streets with motherfuckers who don't even know what a piece of bread is, let along Stravinsky or Charlie Parker. If Bird was alive and played for them they wouldn't be able to hear him because they'd be too damn hungry." Admittedly, jazz had always been the preserve of Bombay's elite. But while the audiences were upper crust, the musicians who cooked up the syncopated rhythms were not. Like Toni Pinto, Ronnie Monserrate, Chris and Lorna, the majority were Roman Catholics strivers from the former Portuguese colony of Goa, 550 kilometres south of Bombay. They'd been an important part of the Bombay music scene since the 1920s, when Bombay began to develop its appetite for what was then called "hot music". Jazz had made its way from New Orleans in the waxy grooves of phonograph records and travelled over the oceans with touring American bands that played for the administrators of the Raj. Bombay's first jazz concerts were performed at the Bandstand, south of the Oval. Among the earliest jazzmen to play an extended stint in Bombay was Leon Abbey, a violinist from Minnesota, who led an eight-piece band at the Taj during the 1935-'36 season. Abbey wore white tails on stage and played the freshest sounds. He told one interviewer, "I kept up with the latest numbers because someone would always come up to the bandstand and say, 'Old Bean, would you play so and so.', because as far as he was concerned, we should know how to play everything that had ever been written." Midway through the trip, the Taj management sent Abbey and saxophonist Art Lanier back to New York to pick up the latest music. Abbey's outfit was replaced by the Symphonians, fronted by the cornet player Cricket Smith. Smith had been featured on the seminal recordings made by James Reese Europe's Society Orchestra in 1913 and 1914, capturing jazz at the moment of its transition from the relatively unsophisticated ragtime style. Smith "signed his contract for a fixed amount of money and two Coronas a day, so every day, the manager would have to bring him his cigars", recalls Luis Moreno, a Spanish trumpet player who lived in Bombay for 20 years. "He was a character." In 1938, pianist Teddy Weatherford, who had played with Louis Armstrong, took the stage with his men. His swinging style and treble voicing had been an important influence on jazz during its formative years. The Taj, it would seem, wasn't quite the genteel venue it now is not at least from the way Weatherford's occasional Russian bassist named 'Innocent Nick' described the gigs to the jazz magazine Storyville. "Teddy used to play downstairs, in the Tavern of the Taj, for the soldiers, sailors and others, a very rough place," Nick said. "Teddy would play for hours without a break. Even with drinks, he would continue one-handed. He had tremendous hands." For the African-American musicians, Bombay provided refuge from the apartheid in the U.S. Men like Weatherford and his sidemen, such as the saxophonist Roy Butler, spent long years shuttling between Europe and the subcontinent, where racial barriers seemed non-existent, at least for them. Butler's years in India as a Weatherford sideman, he told Storyville, were among his happiest the work was relatively easy, the pay and conditions good, he was treated splendidly by both management and clientele, and enjoyed the luxurious life under the British Raj. The Taj management, on its part, honoured Weatherford by naming a dish after him: Poires Glace Weatherford. (The absence of colour prejudice was only to be expected. After all, industrial baron Jamshetji Tata was moved to build the Taj after being prevented one leisurely Bombay evening from dining at the Europeans-only Pyrke's Apollo Hotel. Later, he famously hung a notice in the Taj forbidding entry to South Africans and dogs.) Weatherford's sidemen were an eclectic lot and opened Bombay's ears to a wealth of new sounds, the Cuban drumming of Luis Pedroso and the Spanish brass of Luis Moreno, among them. Butler, who was known as the Reverend in acknowledgement of his abstemious ways, helped Weatherford drill the band. Moreno characterised Butler as the "gentleman of the orchestra". Moreno added, "He never drank in his life and if someone said, 'How about a round of drink?' Roy would say, 'I'll have an ice-cream. You enjoy beer, I enjoy ice-cream." Butler went on to lead his own band at Greens, located where the Taj Intercontinental now stands. Both Weatherford (who married an Anglo-Indian woman, before dying of cholera in Calcutta in 1945, aged 41) and Butler recruited Goan sidemen, plugging Bombay into the source of jazz. The trumpet player Frank Fernand, who played in Weatherford band with his Goan compatriots, Micky Correa and Josique Menzies, says that his stint with the American taught him to "play like a negro". Moreno helped Fernand develop the ability to hit long, high notes, eventually extending his range up to E flat. Butler, it must be noted, was less than thrilled with his Goan employees. "My short stretch as a bandleader in India was not too earth-shaking," he told Storyville. "The local musicians were not too familiar with jazz at that time. I understood that there are some very good jazzmen out there now, but the time was too short for anything to develop, good or bad." For their part, some of the Goan musicians weren't overly impressed with Butler, either. They believed his decision to stay in India was motivated by the fear that he wouldn't find work in the US. As Fernand put it, "The faltu fellows stayed, the good ones went home." But by the '40s, Bombay's swing bands had earned a solid reputation. After listening to Mickey Correa and Frank Fernand play their hearts out the wind section in the outfit fronted by Rudy Cotton (a Parsi who had been born Cawasji Khatau), one contemporary correspondent wrote that "the band really jumped, just another bunch of righteous boys who helped to prove, if proof were needed, that this jazz of ours has developed into an international language". Both Lorna and Chris lived on the edges of a precinct of cemeteries known as Sonapur the City of Gold. Lorna lives to the south of Sonapur, in Guzder House in the Dhobi Talao neighbourhood. When the wind blows east, her starkly furnished room is filled with the aroma of hot mawa cakes and fluffy buns being unloaded from the ovens in Kayani's bakery next door. In the narrow corridors of Guzder House, even whispers carry clear down the hallway, and the mundane details of Lorna's spats with Chris became common knowledge. "He was a big gambler," one neighbour recalls. "He'd come in a car and say, "Lorna, give me 5,000 rupees.' She'd go to the bank and withdraw it. All her savings were wiped out." Chris lived to the north of Sonapur, opposite the church of Sao Francisco Xavier in Dabul. Once he got home, he became a strict but caring father. "He was very religious," his eldest son Giles told one interviewer. "We had to recite the Rosary at 8 every evening. At 12 noon and at dusk, we had to say the Angelus. If the phone ran during prayers he would say, 'Throw the phone out.'" Miles, another of Chris Perry's sons, described his father's devotion to his art. "His daily routine when he woke up was to first smoke a cigarette and then blow his trumpet. Only then would he go for a wash." His son Errol added: "He always had his favourite instrument close to him. Even while he slept, the trumpet would be on one side and mummy on the other." The neighbourhood in which Lorna and Chris lived had long been the focus of Catholic migrants from Goa. The first significant numbers of Goan migrants came to Bombay in 1822, liberal partisans fleeing political persecution in the Portuguese colony for the safety of British India. More followed in 1835 after a rebellion by mixed-race mestizos deposed Goa's first native-born governor general, Bernardo Peres da Silva. The mestizos launched a two-year reign of terror, forcing da Silva's supporters into exile. As the century progressed, Goan emigration to Bombay swelled. The Portuguese hadn't been especially attentive to developing industries, so the pressure on cultivable land was intense. Adding to this, many Goans chafed under the oppression of the bhatkars, as the feudal landlords were known. By the 1920s, many Goan men were being employed as seamen by such British lines as BI, P&O, Anchor and Clan. They used Bombay as a base between their voyages. Other Goans found work as domestic helpers in British households and social institutions. The early Goan fortune-seekers were almost all male: The arduous overland journey from Goa to Bombay, which took between 10 and 15 days, discouraged women. But the opening of the rail line between territories in April 1881 changed that. By the 1930s, Goans in Bombay had come to be associated with the ABC professions: they were ayahs (maids), butlers and cooks. In a column titled Random Jottings published by the Anglo-Lusitanian Journal in 1931, a writer calling himself Atropos noted that of the 37,000 Goans resident in Bombay that year, 14,000 were seamen, 7,000 were cooks or waiters and 3,000 were ayahs. A full 700 were estimated to be musicians. (At least 7,000 Goans were unemployed.) The neighbourhoods around Sonapur began to fill up with Goan dormitories known as coors, a word that derived from the Portuguese cuadd or room. These were established by individual villages back in Goa to provide a home away from home for their neighbours who were too poor to maintain two residences, one in the village and the other in the city. By 1958, half of the estimated 80,000 Goans in Bombay lived in such quarters which were now being called "clubs", adopting the word used to describe the chummeries many firms had established for their single European employees, writes Olga Valladares in her 1958 thesis titled The Coor System a study of Goan club life in Bombay. As you walk down the narrow lanes of the neighbourhoods around Sonapur today, you can see fading signboards for them everywhere: the Boa Morte Association (Club of Majorda); St Anne's Club of Ponda; Fatradicares Club; The Original Grand Club of Pombura; Nossa Senhora dos Milagres, Club of Sangrem. There were 341 Goan clubs in the city in 1958, mainly between Dhobi Talao and Dabul. The seamen who lived in them found it easy from there to get to the docks and the shipping offices, while the cooks and domestics were within walking distance of the produce sellers at Crawford Market, where their chores began before they moved on to their employer's establishments each day. Life in the clubs was spartan. Residents were allowed minimal baggage, usually a big trunk. "Life was lived out of the box and on it," Valladares says. The club-dweller's box "is not only the repository of all personal possessions, his wardrobe and his safe, but it is his dining table at mealtimes and his bed at night." The altar was the centrepiece of the club. In addition to statues of Christ and Mary, they contained icons of the patron saint of the village, decorated with offerings of flowers. Every evening, members were required to gather around the altar to say the Rosary. The highlight of the year was the celebration in exile of the village feast. Collections were taken up and, after Mass, there was an elaborate meal, followed by musical performances. The music, old-timers recall, was superb. After all, the musical talents of Goans had earned the community a formidable reputation throughout the subcontinent. The Portuguese may have neglected higher education in Goa, but the parochial schools first established in 1545 put into place a solid system of musical training. As early as 1665, a Goan choir performed an oratorio by Giacome Carissimi in seven voices at the Basilica of Bom Jesu. The recital caused such a sensation, it led the Carmelite musician Guiseppe di Santa Maria to declare, "I feel I am in Rome." The clash of civilisations in Goa created a whole range of syncretic forms: the Goa sausage was a Portuguese chorizo with a tear-inducing splash of Indian spice; cashew feni was drunk in a leisurely Iberian manner after sundown; and the mando the only harmonised folk musical form on the subcontinent melded saudade, the nostalgic melancholy that pervades Portuguese fado, with Indian folk melodies. Transgressing subcontinental norms, the mando was the accompaniment for social dancing between the sexes; as the musicians crooned their songs of yearning, couples struck up delicate postures of stylised courtship. Their musical inclination came in handy when Goans sought work in British India. They soon established themselves as the musicians of the Raj, staffing the orchestras established by British administrators and by Indian maharajahs seeking to appear sophisticated. In Bombay, Goan musicians took over both ends of the music business. In 1888, The Times of India mentions a Goan ensemble playing in the Bombay Philharmonic Orchestra in the Town Hall. Other Goan groups are said to have displaced the Muslim street bands that played at the weddings of the common folk and other festive occasions. Salvador Pinto, who played coronet in the Volunteer Corps, is thought to have formed the first proper street band, writes Bombay local historian Dr Teresa Albuquerque. She says that the demand for Goan musicians was so great, one ingenious man named Francisco Menezes trawled through the clubs to find unemployed men to march in the processions, instructing them to inflate their cheeks without blowing a note. Dhobi Talao's Goans were prominent not only as musicians but also in the city's musical instrument trade. L M Furtado opened his store in Jer Mahal, around the corner from where Lorna lives, in the 1920s, importing pianos and violins that had been tropicalised to keep them from warping in the Bombay swelter. Marques and Company was nearby. Goan musicians also conjured up soundscapes for the silent films. Bombay's Watson's Hotel had been host to India's first cinema screening on July 7, 1896, a show that advertised itself as "living photographic pictures in life-sized reproductions by Messrs Lumiere Brothers". By New Year's day in 1900, the Tivoli Theatre was screening 25 pictures, with music by a string band. A portrait photographer named Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatavdekar became the first Indian to import a motion-picture camera from London and he shot a wrestling match between two well-known musclemen in 1897. Other locally shot films followed, including Alibaba, Hariraj and Buddha by a Bengali named Hiralal Sen. A creative flashback projects the tantalising image of Bombay audiences drinking in black-and-white scenes from Indian folktales as a Goan string quartet trots out phrases from Mozart and snatches of mandos, varying the tempo to match the action on screen. Goans have stayed in the picture ever since. To be continued.....