This post is long overdue. Eight years ago, I received a note from Irena Yashin-Shaw about her father. Here’s what she said:
Walter Yashin was a Russian musician who had a dance band called the Walter Yashin Quintet which played dance music and jazz in the ’50s and early ’60s. He played the violin, saxophone and clarinet.
In 1939 Walter arrived in Calcutta from Shanghai where he had been working at a place called The French Club which was an international club although situated in the French quarter. However because of imminent Japanese invasion he accepted the offer to go to Calcutta as part of a 12-piece orchestra to play at the Grand Hotel. His original band in Shanghai went on to Hong Kong but later when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong they were all put into a concentration camp where the band leader died.
His was an itinerant life. He was born in 1907 in Laishevo which was a small town near Kazan in Russia. In 1915 his mother sister and he travelled east across the huge continent of Russia by train which took 11 days to meet his father in Vladivostok. His father was in the army reserve and had been called into the military to serve in the far east. Following the revolution in Russia his family went to live in Harbin in 1922 – a town whence many ‘white’ Russians fled.
Walter Yashin took up the violin at the age of 20 as a hobby never imagining that it would end up becoming his livelihood. Originally a language teacher in his early 20s he began working as a musician in in Peking (Beijing) after the occupation of Harbin by the Japanese. The leader of the Peking Hotel orchestra was a wonderful violinist who was a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory and had previously played in the Harbin Symphony Orchestra. He gave Yashin lessons. In 1935 his band secured a contract to play in Hanoi for a year before returning to China to work in Shanghai.
For the first part of his life Walter was itinerant because of political events – war, occupation revolution. For the rest of his life he was itinerant because of the nature of his work as a musician, travelling around the sub-continent with his bands.
Over the 25 years after his arrival in India he had various contracts with different bands in Calcutta, Karachi, Colombo, Kathmandu, New Delhi and many other places. In Colombo he worked and lived on-site at the Gaulle Face Hotel in 1958 and 1959. This is also where he married Merle Hillier and had his only child Irena.
In Calcutta in the 50s and early 60s the Walter Yashin Quintet played at the 300 Club and the Blue Fox. There is an interesting story about Walter’s beautiful violin that he played in the band. Isaac Stern the world renowned violinist did a tour in India. When he was in Calcutta his violin didn’t cope with the humidity very well and some of the glue came unstuck. He urgently needed a very high quality violin! Walter was very happy and proud to able to lend him his violin.
Walter retired from playing music in the mid-sixties when the style of popular music began to change from traditional dance music to twist and rock and roll and also for health reasons.
He died of a heart attack in Calcutta in 1968. His wife and young daughter immigrated to Australia where they still live in Brisbane.
