At a time when Bollywood music is ruling the roost, two movies have currently taken movie lovers back in time with their music to the India of the 1940s and 1960s – Detective Byomkesh Bakshi and Bombay Velvet . Two songs stand out – ‘Calcutta Kiss’ and ‘Fifi’ .
‘Calcutta Kiss’ featuring dancer Lauren Gottlieb jiving with four mime artistes is a retro peppy number exuding the soundscape of Calcutta in 1943. The vintage cabaret dance number set in a night club ambience with a mafia kitsch background is a powerful ragtime swing jazz structure.
The peppy groove is footloose-with-a-flair composed by Madboy/Mink (Imaad Shah and Saba Azad) and features a chilled out clarinet backed by an acoustic guitar, synthesizer and drum machine that gets you on your feet.
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‘Fifi’ recalls the Bombay of 1960 and features Anushka Sharma as a 60s’ jazz singer lip-syncing Geeta Dutt’s ‘Jaata Kahaan Hain Deewaane’ from the 1956 movie
Both songs and movies are set to the original period’s ambience. Rapper Sumukh Mysore aka Smokey, who was part of one of the song production in Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, says this is an interesting change. “Audiences want something different from the saturated item songs. These soundtracks fit into the films. Songs are being oriented towards how the film is set in the perspective of the background score. They are not really the commercial songs that come out just for you to listen.” He adds that he noticed this trend after Delhi Belly . “Music in films has become more retro and part of the storyline. This is a big transition in music production for movies.”
Blues musician Aditya Manral is fascinated with these songs since they are old tunes mixed and given a new form. “While ‘Calcutta Kiss’ takes you back to the good old cabaret days, ‘Fifi’ adds its own refreshing vibe to the vintage jazz scene.”
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“It’s wonderful to see how creatively old forms of music are being reintroduced into mainstream Bollywood. This sort of music definitely helps in recreating an era visually and aurally. We relate to the 40 and 60s era with jazz music, orchestras, wind instruments and strings among others and we can hear all that in these tracks. Though it’s fused with modern mixing and production, you still get a feel of the 40s and 60s.”
Composer and musician Prakash Sontakke has a different perspective. “Some of these songs really look well into the past. But it’s not our past so much. It’s more of an American past they are trying to recreate. When I saw ‘Calcutta Kiss’, I was reminded more of a Moulin Rouge kind of setting that is reminiscent of an American club scene in the 40s and 50s rather than the Indian setting in the same era. The concept is really good but somewhere it has been confused. Maybe ‘Fifi’ is closer to that. When I recall the 60s of Bombay and Calcutta, the setting was vintage and still Indian in its feel. All jazz was not cabaret and all cabaret was not jazz. It will be sad if people only think cabaret happened in clubs. In fact, there was a fantastic jazz scene in India at that particular time. It was the peak of the jazz movement, mostly in Bombay. So the movies are somewhat of a let-down for me but it’s still fine. At least by recreating this kind of Hollywood music, there is some quality coming in to Bollywood music.”