The room belongs to Rui Lobo’s cat, Ceul. She creates music by walking over the keyboard and producing a single note on a guitar when she bites off a string. She sleeps on sheet music, eats sheet music and of course, plays with sheet music. Tom, on the other hand, perches himself on Francis Avezado’s shoulder as he tries to make sense of the seven brass instruments that are strewn around. His personal favourite is the piccolo. It is as small as him and he is not scared of it. Tom is Avezado’s pet crow.
These fringe characters are often as important than the ones in the lead, in the Marquezian world of Goa’s brass musicians. “The word is 'musician,” I was corrected by one of them as he looked out of the window and tuned his tenor saxophone, “not bandwallah.”
Maybe it’s a matter of semantics. But for the musicians of Goa, who wander from the reverie of a feast to contemplation at a neighbourhood cemetery, their identity testifies to their manner of practice. Music, like a lot of things in laid-back Goa, is intrinsically linked to faith. Their music is not about the theatre that seems to accompany brass performers from elsewhere; it’s a silent call of longing, of remembrances of a time gone by.
It is a dying art, their music of everyday words and songs of love and loss. All of Goa has only one trombone player, and a few scores that play the trumpet and the sax. But like hopeless lovers trying to keep a memory alive, they prefer to look at their world with rose-tinted glasses. As he finishes playing La Vie En Rose, David Pereira introduces me to his cat, called Seventy Five. “You see, her screw is slightly off. She is not a full hundred percent sane. So, you know, Seventy Five.”
Raj Lalwani describes himself as a work in progress, for whom, photography is a little like a cup of Earl Grey – brewed with time.
These images were part of the Bajaatey Raho exhibition in Delhi last year, part of a collaborative project under the aegis of the Neel Dongre Awards/Grants for Excellence in Photography.
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These fringe characters are often as important than the ones in the lead, in the Marquezian world of Goa’s brass musicians. “The word is 'musician,” I was corrected by one of them as he looked out of the window and tuned his tenor saxophone, “not bandwallah.”
Maybe it’s a matter of semantics. But for the musicians of Goa, who wander from the reverie of a feast to contemplation at a neighbourhood cemetery, their identity testifies to their manner of practice. Music, like a lot of things in laid-back Goa, is intrinsically linked to faith. Their music is not about the theatre that seems to accompany brass performers from elsewhere; it’s a silent call of longing, of remembrances of a time gone by.
It is a dying art, their music of everyday words and songs of love and loss. All of Goa has only one trombone player, and a few scores that play the trumpet and the sax. But like hopeless lovers trying to keep a memory alive, they prefer to look at their world with rose-tinted glasses. As he finishes playing La Vie En Rose, David Pereira introduces me to his cat, called Seventy Five. “You see, her screw is slightly off. She is not a full hundred percent sane. So, you know, Seventy Five.”
Raj Lalwani describes himself as a work in progress, for whom, photography is a little like a cup of Earl Grey – brewed with time.
These images were part of the Bajaatey Raho exhibition in Delhi last year, part of a collaborative project under the aegis of the Neel Dongre Awards/Grants for Excellence in Photography.