Saligao Summer: Saturday with a Jazz Legend

Panjim residents marked International Jazz Day a few days early with a Braz Gonsalves. I was happy to be in the audience with a large number of like-minded jazz fans.

As a child growing up in New York, where rap music was the flavour of the day, I was an oddball for loving jazz. But the 11-year old me would listen to WNEW radio with all my attention on its programming and not on my homework. Something about listening to jazz, the greatest art form produced in the United States, made me feel incredibly blissful. I felt closer to the African-Americans who were the pioneers of jazz than to their descendants who brought about rap (something of an acquired taste for me).

India, or rather my hometown Bombay, had its share of jazz lovers in the golden age of this genre and hosted its fair share of great musicians and concerts. The book Taj Mahal Foxtrot by Naresh Fernandes documents this brilliantly.

Jazz has been kept alive in India largely thanks to Goan musicians, among them Braz Gonsalves, now 91-years young. I was fortunate enough to witness a concert of his quintet when I took part in the Liberty and Light Festival of Goa in 2022. On that magical late-May evening in Panjim, a city tired of the pandemic witnessed a delightful concert.

Ever since then, my interest in India’s post-independence and contemporary jazz scene has grown. When I was told of Braz’s concert on Saturday, I immediately bought a ticket, but the journey to the south of the state and back had taken a bit of a toll on me. I knew the drive to the capital would take 45 minutes and I was about to cancel my plans before deciding to make it. And what a great decision it was!

The venue, a small restaurant and bar was already packed a few minutes before the scheduled start time. I was lucky enough to find a bar stool from where I could enjoy the concert in close range. Just a few feet in front of me was one of the world’s greatest saxophonists, and the singer in the quintet was his beautiful wife Yvonne! They got married 14 years before I was born and seem to still be madly in love with each other. You could see this when the quintet played the 1927 George Gershwin classic ‘S Wonderful.’

Service at the restaurant was so slow that many a patron came up to the bar to order and take drinks back to their tables. Some people on seeing me a second or third time started smiling and indulging in small talk. One particular resident of north Goa explained how an Urak cocktail was prepared. Urak is the first distillation of fermented cashew apple juice. This gentleman didn’t trust the staff in making the cocktail properly so he asked for all the ingredients separately and did it himself.

“Come and have a glass at our table,” he said. “Oh, I don’t drink,” I said. “Come on, you lying bugger. You don’t have to feel shy here,” he said with a giggle. I smiled and nodded, but stayed at the bar, until he came back five minutes later with a glass for me! Was I back in Russia or some Luso-Indian tropical version of the country, I thought to myself!

The 91-year old saxophonist was at his best on this Saturday evening and the knowledgeable public enjoyed this performance which lasted for about two hours. The quintet asked for the crowd to sing the song Autumn Leaves with them and I enthusiastically joined in, only to realise that I was the *only* person singing along-something the band seemed to appreciate.

What made this concert even more special was how the musicians mingled and conversed with the crowd. This felt very much like a community event and I was totally made to feel at home. I speak anecdotally here, but my experience over the last three years in Goa has been overwhelmingly positive and I have been embraced with open arms by a cross section of society in this beautiful state.

I told members of the quintet to get more of theirs’ and Braz’s music on Spotify and Youtube. More jazz lovers around the world needed to listen to them, I said.

This splendid summer sojourn in Saligao has been full of pleasant surprises.