The sun had just set over the Arabian Sea. Fine wine flowed, glasses clinked, and guests ambled across the manicured lawns of the Taj Malabar Hotel on Willingdon Island in Kochi.
The air was electric as art enthusiasts, creators and socialites gathered to celebrate the Kochi-Muziris Biennale recently. Between meet-and-greets and toasts, a stream of jazz drifted through the crowd, instantly hooking attention.
On stage sat a man with stray tufts of silver peeking out from beneath a flat cap. As he breathed life into the reed in his hands, fingers gliding over the keys, the night stirred awake. It was one of those rare moments when the realisation dawns that one need not search for John Coltrane or Dizzy Gillespie to hear unadulterated jazz.
When you have Braz Gonsalves back home, the doyen of Indian jazz, the search ends there.
His breath took shape as music, spilling into the lawns as the crowd milled about — hips grooving, legs swaying, fingers trying to catch rhythms just off the beat. Slowly, ‘The Braz Gonsalves Legacy Collective’ took over the night.
Earlier that day, Goa-based Braz and his wife, Yvonne Gonsalves, sat down for a freewheeling chat about his life in jazz and gospel music. For Braz, now a nonagenarian, memories of a sweeping musical journey, though fragmented, remain remarkably intact. Like a well-preserved vinyl record.
India once swayed to the spell of jazz culture. From the 1930s through the 1950s and ’60s — the golden period of Indian Jazz. It was during this era that Braz set stages on fire with his saxophone. Performing at the glitzy jazz bars of Bombay and Calcutta, he was the man of the moment.
He even played the saxophone solo at the start of the song ‘Om Shanti Om’, from the 1980s movie Karz, that catapults the song before the opening verse by Kizhore Kumar’s baritone.
One could say Braz was destined for jazz. Even the name strikes the right note. “No, no… it’s not a stage name,” he laughs. “It’s my real name in Portuguese.”
Yvonne adds, “In English, it’s actually Blaise. He was named after St Blaise.”
Braz explains softly that it is written as Bras in Portuguese.
“So it sounds like ‘Brash’, but nobody calls him that, and it became Braz,” Yvonne says. “Now it’s just Braz, and it sounds like jazz. And I was Vaz before I took on the surname Gonsalves,” she quips.
Music entered Braz’s life early. It started with the violin. “Learning music was compulsory in my parish school. They taught us solfeggios,” he recalls.
“The music notes came from Rome, and we had to read and sing in Latin. They gave us a lot to study.”
And then? “I grew up and took up the saxophone!” he smiles. Yvonne corrects him that it was the clarinet that came first. “Ah yes, the clarinet. My father brought me my first one,” says Braz.
Soon Braz started doing gigs. “People wanted live music. I would go with my clarinet, and a rhythm section would accompany me,” he recalls.
His first professional job came unexpectedly — with a circus, travelling from Goa to Lucknow. After that, he moved to Delhi, where jazz found him.
Braz went on to lead bands in some of the most prominent nightclubs in Bombay and Calcutta, playing tenor, alto and soprano saxophones. “I could play pop music too,” he says. “I played from the heart. I guess people liked me because I wasn’t playing intricate, rigid music.”
His reputation as the country’s most successful reed player grew rapidly. He came to be best known for collaborations with pianist Louis Banks and vocalist Pam Crain. Their partnership produced the famed ‘Raga Rock’.
“I composed it in Todi raga,” he says. “I studied a book on Indian ragas and took classical lessons. The composition formed in my head. We played it, and it sounded beautiful.”
At the peak of his popularity, Braz stepped away from jazz after a life-altering accident in Munich, where he slipped on black ice and broke his arm. “I felt I had neglected God for too long. He gave me everything, and it was my turn to give back,” he says.
He devoted the next 25 years to gospel music. It was only in 2020 that Braz returned to jazz, this time with his grandson, Jarryd Rodrigues. “I taught him the basics, and now he performs across the country,” says Braz.
Back at the Biennale lawns, The Braz Gonsalves Collective — Ian de Noronha on keyboards, Jeshurun D’Cruz on drums, Risa Rodrigues on bass, Yvonne on vocals and the legendary saxophonist himself — played well into the night.
Each song drew cheers and calls for encores. For Braz Gonsalves, the night, like his music, only grew younger.