“Sure, we had to transport the piano from venue to venue,” Kava explained.) (Not pictured here are six men who were vital to the smooth functioning of the Music Makers and indeed, most Bombay dance bands of the time – well-muscled coolies. If you look closely, you’ll see that the photograph was signed at the bottom by two visiting American musicians: Dave Brubeck and Joe Morello. It was shot at the Bandra Gymkhana when his band, the Music Makers, was staffed with best-known performers of the Bombay jazz world: pianist Toni Pinto, trumpet player Chic Chocolate and saxophonist Norman Mobsby. This photo was taken in 1958, when Mina Kava – peering out from behind the drums – was still a few years away from his burst of success (or at least success as defined by the standards of the tiny world of Indian dance music). Over the next few years, I’d come to learn a little more about how Mina Kava came to compose the first-ever Indo-pop hit. So I was more than a little intrigued when, deep into the graveyard shift at The Times of India in 1991, my Parsi colleague Roxanne Kavarana told me that not only did she know the man who had composed the tune, she was actually related to him. Perhaps because it’s invariably performed alongside tunes like Galyan Sakli Sonyachi and Sonyachi Kavla, I’d always thought of Bombay Meri Hai as a traditional Bombay Catholic tune. 'Bombay Meri Hai' by Mina Kava and His Music Makers. Bombay Meri Hai is among the songs in the “masala” section of Catholic wedding parties – the fast-paced crescendo during which revellers wave white handkerchiefs above their heads to conjure up a long-forgotten aboriginal past as they dance to Marathi and Konkani folk tunes. But mostly, I heard the tune being performed week after week by wedding bands at the Bandra Gymkhana, opposite my grandparents’ home.
When I was a child, the song was always being played on Saturday Date, the pop music request show on All India Radio. I marvelled at how a song composed by a guy who lived around the corner from me in Bombay had spread around the globe like this.īombay Meri Hai is among my earliest musical memories. As I tucked into my hoppers and curry, a Sinhalese version of Bombay Meri Hai titled Ran Ran Ran blasted out of the speakers. The first time I realised that the tune was hugely popular south of the Palk Straits was in 2000, while eating a meal in a Sri Lankan restaurant in the New York borough of Staten Island. As a finale, they performed the song Bombay Meri Hai – a tune that has been a Bombay party standard since it was released four decades ago. In 2004, the Sri Lankan pop sensations from the 1960s, The Jetliners, held a reunion concert in Colombo.
#Konkani baila dance mp3 movie