Noise Uprising

MICHAEL DENNING is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the co-director of Yale’s Initiative on Labor and Culture. He is the author of Culture in the Age of Three Worlds; The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century; Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America; and Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. He coordinates the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, whose collective work includes “Going into Debt,” published online in Social Text’s Periscope, and “Spaces and Times of Occupation,” published in Transforming Anthropology. In 2014, he received the Bode-Pearson lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association.

Noise The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

Uprising Michael Denning

Offset edition published in April 2016 Digital print edition, March 2020 LeftWord Books 2254/2A Shadi Khampur New Ranjit Nagar New Delhi 110008 INDIA LeftWord Books is the publishing division of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd. leftword.com ISBN 978-93-80118-32-1 © Michael Denning For sale in South Asia only By arrangement with Verso, 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

words, for Fred Jameson music, for Tony Lombardozzi

“Insurgency was a massive and systematic violation of those words, gestures and symbols which had the relations of power in colonial society as their significata. This was perceived as such both by its protagonists and their foes. The latter were often quick to register their premonition of an uprising as a noise in the transmission of some of the more familiar signals of deference.” Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India “We would also uncover the same transformations, the same progress and the same eagerness if we enquired into the fields of dance, song, rituals and traditional ceremonies. Well before the political or armed struggle, a careful observer could sense and feel in these arts the pulse of a fresh stimulus and the coming combat. Unusual forms of expression, original themes no longer invested with the power of invocation but the power to rally and mobilize with the approaching conflict in mind. Everything conspires to stimulate the colonized’s sensibility, and to rule out and reject attitudes of inertia and defeat. By imparting new meaning and dynamism to artisanship, dance, music, literature, and the oral epic, the colonized subject restructures his own perception. The world no longer seems doomed. Conditions are ripe for the inevitable confrontation.” Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture”

Contents

Foreword by Naresh Fernandes

xi

Introduction 1 1 Turnarounds: The Soundscape of Vernacular Phonograph Music, 1925–1930

15

2 The Polyphony of Colonial Ports: The Social Space of the Vernacular Music Revolution 35 An Archipelago of Colonial Ports 40 Musical Cultures of the Colonial Ports 46 Counterpoint of Musicians 60 3 Phonographing the Vernacular: Remaking the World of Music 67 The Music Industry in the Age of Electrical Recording 69 Vernacular Phonograph Music and the World Musical Guild 85 4 Phonograph Culture: The Remaking of Vernacular Musicking 109 A World of Record Players 110 From Song and Dance to Records 126

x 5 Decolonizing the Ear: The Cultural Revolution of Vernacular Phonograph Musics 135 His Master’s Voice? Colonizing the Ear 140 The Coming Combat 147 Trans-Colonial Reverberations 167 6 “A Noisy Heaven and a Syncopated Earth”: Remaking the Musical Ear 171 Noisy Timbres 174 The Servants’ Hall of Rhythm 186 Weird Harmonies 199 Recorded Improvisations 206 7 Remastering the 78s: Reverberations of a Musical Revolution 217 Antinomies of Folk Revivals 220 Antinomies of World Music 228 Acknowledgments 235 Notes 237 Appendix: Playlist

289

Index 297 List of Figures and Illustrations Map: Colonial Ports and Steamship Routes Table 1: Port Populations Table 2: Birthdates of Musicians Figure 1: Exports of Discs during the Recording Boom Table 3: Idioms, Ensembles, and Instruments

36 43 54 75 176

Foreword Naresh Fernandes

In November 1932, the denizens of the distant Bombay suburb of Bandra gathered in the black-stone building of St Andrew’s School for a fundraiser featuring a variety of amateur acts. There were comic songs, “oriental dances” and much applause for the lively portrait of gypsy life. Among the highlights of the evening, reported The Times of India, was “a Hawaiian camp scene in which Mademoiselle Collier de Pearle gave an excellent replica of Honolulu’s coy maidens dancing the Hula-hula, enlivened by a song.” That wasn’t as surprising as it may now appear. Middle-class Bombay had been fascinated by the South Seas since the mid-1920s.  As the residents of Bandra were cheering Ms. Pearle’s hula hula, one Mrs. Hayes of Jasmine House on Convent Street in the Fort was offering Hawaiian guitar instruction at Rs. 30 a month for four lessons. A short stroll away, Furtado’s music store was selling Hawaiian guitars, complete with canvas case, for Rs. 28. Their ad promised that the instruments were “sweet toned and [of] good finish.” Everyone seems to need someone to exoticise. And by the late 1920s, metropolitan India, the country others saw as a place of snake charmers and opulent maharajas, had chosen to be captivated by women in grass skirts swaying on stage under fake palm trees.The seeds for this fantasy had been sown early in the 1920s, when gramophone

xii records of Hawaiian music began to be imported into the subcontinent. Capitalising on the enthusiaism for South Seas music that was sweeping the world, in 1922 a seven-member group named Ernest Ka’ai and his Royal Hawaiian Troubadours becamethe first music and dance group from that region to visit India. They presented a show called A Night in Honolulu at Bombay’s Excelsior Theatre, performing hula hula dances wearing yellow wreaths. They were to return several times over the next few years and amplify a sound that would leave a profound impression on the subcontinent. This noise uprising wasn’t unique to India. As Michael Denning maps out out so rigorously and eloquently in this book, similar South Seas sounds were already being heard in Batavia and Greece, Brazil and South Africa. In the journey of Hawaiian music to India can be discerned many of the themes that Denning explores so tenaciously. In the 1920s, all sorts of new sounds were travelling across the world in the grooves of gramophone records, sparking polyphonic revolutions in port cities that soon caused vernacular musics to be reimagined in the most unlikely ways. In India, the reverberations set off by this early blast of Hawaiian music were still being felt seven decades later, when the Indian guitar player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt won a Grammy award. Even as Ernest Ka’ai’s Troubadours and groups like the Royal Samoans helped India’s middle classes indulge their interest in Hawaiian music, the foundations for a genuine subcontinental engagement with hula and the Hawaiian slide guitar were laid by a Samoan guitar player named Tau Moe, who stopped by in Calcutta in 1929 on the first of many visits he would make to the country over the next few decades. Moe was a master of the Hawaiian guitar, which is placed horizontally, often across the musician’s lap. The strings are plucked with one hand, as with conventional guitars. But instead of picking out chords with the other hand, Hawaiian guitar players change pitch by sliding metal or glass bars across the strings, giving the instrument its distinctive sound. Tau Moe – or Papa Tau, as he was known – had started his musical career as a schoolboy, playing at a stage show in Honolulu for passengers who had stepped off their cruise ships. In 1927, when he was 19, he met his future wife, Rose, at a steel guitar class. Later that year, they joined a music troupe that had been hired to do a South Pacific musical show in

xiii the Philippines, setting off on a voyage that would keep them away from Hawaii for 60 years. Over the next few years, they played Hawaiian music in Japan and China. They even did a stint at the Taj in Bombay in the 1930s before heading to Berlin, where they met Hitler at a fundraiser for orphans. The 1940s found them back in India and they spent almost all of the Second World War in Calcutta, performing at the Grand Hotel and other establishments. “We played Glenn Miller arrangements (or my own) but always included Hawaiian music,” Moe told one interviewer. “We would do a session of jazz band music, then some classical music, then a Hawaiian session with me on steel guitar.” The couple’s son, Lani, who had been born in Kyoto, choreographed the show, in addition to singing and dancing with the band. Their daughter, Dorian, was born in Calcutta in 1946, during a burst of intense Hindu-Muslim rioting. The Moe family would later start performing as the Aloha Four. In between his gigs, Tau Moe found the time to cut just over two dozen tracks of Hawaiian music, with members of his family and with jazz musicians who were in the city at the time. At some point during his stay in India, Moe met Mahatma Gandhi. “He was a very highly educated man and I enjoyed the 35 minutes were spent talking to him,” Moe told one interviewer. The musician thought that Gandhi’s dhoti was similar to the lava-lava worn by Pacific Islanders, but told the political leader that it was unusual to see the garment tucked between the legs. “He laughed and said, ‘Well, I am better off than you Polynesian people who walk about without shirts,’” recalled Moe. During Tau Moe’s stay in India between 1941 and 1947, he taught several Indians how to play the steel guitar, most notably an AngloIndian named Garney Nyss. Garney Nyss was a man of varied talents. He played first division cricket in Bengal for many years, including an exhibition match at the Eden Gardens in 1943 under the captaincy of CK Nayudu. The hockey legend Dhyan Chand was so in awe of his prowess with the stick, he once exclaimed, “What kind of player are you, Nyss? Have you dropped from heaven?” He was such an insightful ornithologist, Salim Ali wanted to co-author a book with him. He was an excellent photographer, and his book Memories is a well-observed record of the India of the 1940s. But

xiv between playing hockey for Bengal for 18 years and making documentary films on Himalayan birds and Mother Teresa, Nyss and his band, the Aloha Boys, made approximately 60 sides of Hawaiian music for HMV in the 1940s. The Aloha Boys played in “a very authentic Hawaiian style”, said Bob Brozman, an American researcher and guitarist who worked with Tau Moe from 1998 until his death in 2004. Brozman met Nyss in Calcutta in 1998, the year the Anglo-Indian musician died, and was impressed by his generosity and talent. Nyss was a “wonderful man, full of music, could play well even up to the end of his life,” Brozman said. Despite his competing passions, Nyss also found the time to teach music (he gave classes at the Calcutta School of Music until shortly before his death). It wasn’t long before his students began to use the Hawaiian guitar to perform Rabindrasangeet and introduce the instrument to the Hindi film-music industry. In addition, the slide techniques used by Hawaiian guitar players gave Indian musicians new ideas about how Hindustani classical music could be played on the guitar. Among the Hindustani musicians who was prompted to rethink his approach to his instrument was Brij Bhushan Kabra, a young man from Jodhpur, who heard the Hawaiian guitar on a holiday to Calcutta in the 1950s. “The instrument sounded clean and melodious, and I wanted to learn it,” he told one interviewer. Kabra modified his instrument, retuning some strings. Call of the Valley, the album he made in 1967 in collaboration with flautist Hari Prasad Chaurasia and santoor player Shiv Kumar Sharma, is the largest-selling Hindustani classical recording ever. Kabra’s approach, in turn, left a mark on Jaipur’s Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. He plays a modified version of the guitar that he calls the Mohan veena. His website says that he has “attracted international attention by his successful Indianisation of the western Hawaiian guitar with his perfect assimilation of sitar, sarod and veena techniques, by giving it a evolutionary design and shape and by adding 14 more strings.” In 1994, this long chain of auditory adventure and assimilation set off by the Hawaiian records imported into India, the performances of Ernest Ka’ai, and Tau Moe, and the sides cut by Garney Nyss and the Aloha Boys resulted in a Grammy award, when Bhatt won the prestigious prize with Ry Cooder for their album, Meeting By the River.

xv As Michael Denning points out, similar sonic transformations were occurring across the planet. The recording industry’s “ambition to phonograph the vernacular” resulted in “the global circulation of local musics across three arcs that connect port cities: the black Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific.” The “recording of tango in Buenos Aires, sonin Havana, and samba in Rio; of hula in Honolulu, huangse yinyue inShanghai, and kroncong in Jakarta; of ṭarab in Cairo, palm-wine in Accra, and marabi in Johannesburg; of flamenco in Seville, tziganein Belgrade, and rebetika in Athens” resulted in “unprecedented syntheses” and hybrids that, like the story of Hawaiian music in India, are still being created. There’s no doubt, as Denning concludes, that this noise uprising has “remade our musical ear.”

Foreword by NAReSH FeRNANDeS author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age

A radically new reading of the origins of recorded music. Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’ jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

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