On January 18, Badal Roy’s niece, Piali Roy, announced that the pioneering tabla player had passed away. Here’s a piece I wrote about him in 1998. Brandishing his spatula like …
India jazz
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The search is eternal and the journey is everlasting. That’s the conclusion Indo-jazz guitar player Arthur Gracias has drawn from a lifetime of playing music, first in Calcutta where he …
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In December 2020, just over nine years after I first wrote about my attempt to dig out information about Mena Silas, the Bombay musician who had composed Taj Mahal: A Foxtrot in 1936, …
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Another episode in our series about jazzy tunes that inspired Bollywood. From Phool Aur Patthar (1966), sung by Asha Bhonsale, here’s Zindagi Mein Pyar Karna Seekh Le. The music was …
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“I had no idea there were so many ashrams around Bombay!” More than four decades after he and his friend Jehangir Dalal got into a car and drove to more …
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A version of this piece appeared in Time Out Mumbai in 2006. Asha Puthli has a somewhat unorthodox relationship with time. When she’s asked about her age, for instance, the …