There were
two cinemas in Mussoorie, the Himalayan hill station where I grew up, that we
regularly visited. One featured mostly English movies, Rialto. The other, much
grander in name, Picture Palace, showed Hindi sari-rippers.
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| Picture Palace, Kulri Mussoorie |
Attending
the movies was a weekly event for most of my youth. For Rs. 1-3 you could spend two hours totally lost in a world of colourful and musical magic. Perfect therapy for kids stuck in a boarding
school hundreds if not thousands of miles away from home.
In about
1970 a really cool (far out, was the phrase we used in those days) restaurant
opened just down the Mall a ways from Picture Palace. It was called The Tavern.
There was so much to commend the place to us. Situated geographically between
Picture Palace and Rialto it was the ideal meeting place for groups of us after
whichever brand of Wood we preferred to support, Bolly or Holly. You had to go
upstairs, which implied some sort of ‘club’ and gave a slightly iniquitous aura
to the venue. This was reinforced once
you got inside and saw that on each table were HUGE ashtrays made out of some
sort of steel car part (gasket?). They screamed, “Fill me up with butts and
ashes!” Heady stuff for us conservative cloistered bunch of Christians.
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| The Tavern, Mussoorie |
The owner of
the Tavern was friends with someone who had access to a steady supply of
American rock n roll records which proved to be the ultimate pull factor for
us. The Doors, Alice Cooper, David
Bowie, Creedence and Santana were always on high rotation at the Tavern. Cigarette or not, money or not, just hanging
out at a window table that overlooked the Mall, listening to the tunes was
proof enough of having arrived at an elevated level of coolness.
To honor
those wonderful memories here is a groovy set of tunes called the Bombay Jazz
Palace a compilation album of fourteen tracks influenced
by both traditional Indian music,
and various species of jazz
and funk. The majority of the
album's music dates from 1970s or late 60s, forming part of the Western
counterculture's growing interest in Asian culture.
The first ten songs are by European and
American musicians (many of whom have
names like classmates of mine: Dave Mackay? Vicky Hamilton?) exploring the
instrumentation, rhythms, and scales of Indian music, with varying degrees of
authenticity. The final four songs show a kind of mirror-image, with Indian
musicians taking influence from popular idioms of Western music from the 1970s.
Notable musicians featured include Lalo Schifrin, Dave Pike, Ravi Shankar, and George Harrison.
(Wikipedia)
Cool!
Light a Wills, order some sheekh kabob and
naan, sip a fresh lime and soda and chill out at the Tavern of your mind!
Track
Listing:
01 Latin Tala (Paul Horn and Nexus)
02 Zoom (Volker Kriegal)
03 Haschish Party [Georges Garvarenz]
04 Blues for Hari [Dave Mackay and Vicky
Hamilton]
05 Raga Jeera Swara [The Dave Pike Set]
06 Contemplation [Between]
07 Secret Code [Lalo Schifrin]
08 Tabla Samba [Grupo Batuque]
09 Path to Ascension [Yves Hyatt]
10 Acka Raga [shocking blue]
11 Dispute & Violence [Shankar Family
and Friends]
12 Raga Bairagi [Shankar Jaikishan]
13 Universal Magic [Ananda Shankar]
14 Bombay Palace Part 1[Muhavishla Ravi Hatchu
and Indo Jazz Following]
