High Memories Jazz Fest 1982

You guys have opened the floodgates. This one is about JazzFest 1982 at the ITF Pavilion on Outram Road.

#7 - JazzFest and the Bins

Satyajit Roychaudhury

will have to realign the memories here because he was, for us, Jazz India and Jazz India organized Jazz Fest at the ITF Pavilion (where the Book Fair was held, among other artistic pursuits like training the Territorial Army)!

I hadn't been in High too long .. probably a year at the most. My last memory of Jazz Fest, as I mentioned before, was playing a set with the band Embryo at the La Martiniere school grounds in 1979. I played bass guitar and spent three days with Uwe, the bassist, learning the lines. My prized possession was a leather guitar strap on which Uwe wrote "Space is the Place" which was deep for me at the time.

So, back to 1981 when I was with High. We were asked to open the program before the legendary Shakti on stage. Several hours of sound check, hot tea and cold feet followed. And we had this weirdly trapezoid Yamaha amplifier that

Subir Chatterjee

was using for lead guitar. The rest is kind of blurry till the point where we were summoned by the one and only L Shankar who requested most politely that he be allowed to "try" Subir's amplifier for his double-necked violin. Permission granted with alacrity!

The gig went reasonably well, we all played our stuff that we had rehearsed, conscious of the fact that the great Shakti was waiting in the wings. Got out of that one alive, then was our turn in the wings as we watched the magic unfold.

The Bins came after that I believe. One sunny day, we walked into Dilip's to find these huge wooden speaker boxes blocking most of the room in which we practised. Mala must have really had a tough time working her way round. We discovered that Dilip had bought them from Jazz India ... that's where the memory fades, I am not sure when and where we used them, but this stark memory of these large speaker bins in the room have stayed with me. These days when we see the huge rigging frameworks and the flying speakers and the plethora of gadgets which sometimes program themselves, I think back to the early days of music when instruments had amplification on stage and each musician had to be mindful of the rest!