The Ottawa Citizen May 2001
Bollywood spices up main stage

Billed as Britain's only Indian wedding brass band, one can imagine how, here in Canada where you can count the Indian wedding brass bands on the fingers of one chicken, many festival-goers may have found the offering truly foreign.

First, a description: They combined brass instruments --trumpets, trombones, saxophones and the like -- with the Indian Dhol drum, creating a curious sea of swirling world-music. In it were latin and samba rhythms mixed with bhangra, as well as Indian wedding and film hits tinged with ska, jazz and, with Alice Kinloch jumping up and down while carrying the bass-line on her sousaphone, a lot of funk. Dressed in baggy black pants and T-shirts broken by bright red sashes, their 16-song, 90-minute show, interrupted briefly by the fireworks display, was highlighted by crowd-pleasers like Na Dil Mang Ve, Apna Punjab and the ever-popular Pardesi, Pardesi.

The Indian flavour came courtesy of Jas Daffu, playing the Dohl drum. Sarha Moore's soprano sax also added exotic spice, lending that snake-charming line usually reserved for clarinet or shehnai. Much of this eclectic recipe, explained Bollywood manager and baritone sax player, Mark Allan, stems from the Indian film music side, from which the band gets its name: India's film industry, cranking out a prodigious 1,000 movies a year, is centred in Bombay and sometimes dubbed Bollywood. "Indian film music," he says, "is really magpie music. They'll use anything that works. "You could say that they were doing world music before there was world music."

Yet even this band has a bit of the magpie in it. It formed in 1992, a year after another band Allan is involved with, the world-beat street-band Crocodile Style, was asked to play for a combination event. "It was for Guy Fawkes Night -- bonfire night -- and also the Hindu and Sikh festival of Diwali -- the festival of lights."

While Crocodile Style couldn't play the event that year, the blocks were laid, and when another festival that Allan was involved with brought an Indian wedding brass band from India to England, the Bollywood Brass Band began to breathe life. "We got some funding so we could pay them to rehearse with us," says Allan, "and teach us to play that style."
"We added a guy named Johnny Kalsi (founder of The Dhol Foundation, a London band consisting of up to 25 Dhol drummers.), who was a pioneer of playing the Dhol in other kinds of music in the U.K." Like the band's genesis, the wedding part occurred as something of an afterthought. "People started asking us to do weddings," says Allan, "which we hadn't thought of. Odd, really, since we were an Indian wedding brass band."

And so the band -- nine members last night, but usually consisting of closer to a dozen -- started finding themselves waking up at six o'clock Sunday mornings, so they could be ready, as Allan puts it, "to play outside somebody's house at about eight o'clock."
Daffu, the only current band-member of Indian descent, explains, "From the groom's house to where he gets married, the big procession in India is usually headed by a brass band."

If that seems odd, one should recall that the British were among the leaders in magpie politics, nesting in India --along with countless military brass bands -- for almost 200 years. "There were whole families of brass players," says Allan. "The band that we learned to play from only had about three surnames between them. "
"They're mostly untouchables," he adds. "It's really a low-caste thing to do."

As the British army had less need for brass bands, Indian musicians, obviously still needing an income, turned to wedding processions. "The whole point of the Indian wedding procession," explains Allan, "is to have the loudest noise, to tell everyone what's happening."

There was no apparent groom at the Tulip Festival that needed announcing last night, but the Bollywood Brass Band managed to make a lot of loud noise, blowing their horns and telling everyone exactly what was happening.

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