Ahead of my trip to Pune for an event at six this evening at the CMYK bookstore at Koregaon Park (do come if you’re free), I suddenly recalled Sardar Dastur Hormazdiar, a Parsi high priest who is a footnote in Taj Mahal Foxtrot. The Pune cleric finds a place in jazz history because of an act of kindness – or fandom? – he displayed in 1958, when he took some hours off to show a visiting American trumpet player around his city. Max Kaminsky was a sideman to Dixieland trombonist Jack Teagarden and, years later, when he wrote his memoirs, he remembered Sardar Dastur Hormazdiar fondly.
“Everywhere we went in India, the people were unfailingly kind and gravious to us, and the jazz fans were passionately devoted,” Kaminsky noted in My Life in Jazz. “But it was in Poona…that I met one of the most impressive and unusual fans I ever had the pleasure of knowing. He was the high priest of the Parsis, and after the concert he asked to be presented to me.”
The dasturji was “a slender olive-skinned man with bright black eyes…dressed in a long white robe and a white turban”, Kaminsky wrote. He “seemed to be one of the original Three Wise Men. You had the feeling he knew everything, and he probably did.”
He drove Kaminsky around Pune (“which has a lot of beautiful temples and palaces”) and then took the musician to his antique-filled home.
The American had never heard of the Parsis before, let alone met one, so the priest filled him in on the community’s history. He told Kaminsky about the migration from Persia and about Parsi burial practices. “As high priest, he was the only one allowed to take the cadavers up to the top of special high towers – Towers of Silence, they’re called – where within five minutes the bones are picked clean” by vultures, Kaminsky wrote. “It’s probably just as well that one doesn’t know what one’s fans are doing on their own time.”
The trumpet player was charmed by the priest’s hospitality. He concluded, “It was strange to picture this stately man seated in his carved teakwood chair during the languid Indian night, listening to a Summa Cum Laude recording of Nobody’s Sweetheart Now.”
I haven’t been able locate that particular track, but here’s a grainy film of Kaminsky performing Royal Garden Blues, only a few months before his Indian sojourn.
1 comment
Yes, indeed, I did attend the Max Kaminisky-Jack Teagarden concerts in Mumbai in 1958.
Kaminsky was not only a great Dixieland/Swing trumpeter but also a very friendly human being.
He stayed at the Ambassador Hotel in Mumbai where I met him and took some photographs of him; in that
group, Jerry Fuller was on clarinet, Ronnie Greb on Drums. I do not remember the name of the bassist.
I happily took Kaminisky around in my car for ‘sight seeing’. A great many years later I watched him perform
at Jimmy Ryans in NYC; I reminded him of our meeting in Bombay; he firmly shook my hand and said, ‘ Sure
I remember you “; of course he didn’t; he was just being polite.
Jack Teagarden was also very friendly and built like a heavyweight boxer and reminded me of Jack Dempsey
as he ( Dempsey) might have looked in his heyday.
After one of the Bombay shows, a Parsi woman walked up to Ronnie Greb who was packing his drums and
was trying to compliment him and Greb said something like, ‘why don’t you come up to my room’.
Girish