Hunched over his Epiphone guitar, in a white shirt and a spry red bowtie, Carlton Kitto is playing a rendition of ‘Cheek to Cheek’ with Ishita Chakravarty singing. He’s holding complex chords, contorting his fingers into impossible shapes, a picture of perfect concentration. He’s one with his instrument — an overwrought cliché maybe, but also one that rings wildly true here. The sound of the guitar seems to merely be an extension of Kitto.
The video — part of the Soundcheck Project, an online series of music videos featuring artistes performing in unconventional settings, conceptualised by Kolkata-based photographer Margub Ali — is from 2014. Ali recalls how Kitto insisted on using his old Yemaha guitar. Yemaha, not the far better-known Yamaha. It was only upon Ali’s insistence that Kitto relented, whipping out an exquisite Epiphone guitar. The Yemaha, lying idle on the side, makes an appearance in the video. A framed newspaper clipping on the wall, in black-and-white, screams out the headline: “Calcutta’s Poet of the Jazz Guitar”.
Kitto passed away last week, aged 74. He’s considered one of the foremost proponents of bebop jazz in the country, a true legend of the form, whose legacy spans decades. Born in Bengaluru, he was a central figure during the glory days of jazz in the Calcutta of the ’70s, a golden age that was decimated by a crippling entertainment tax on clubs and restaurants. The city’s famed Park Street, at the time, was the hub for this music, jazz blaring out from practically every club around — Trincas, Mocambo, Moulin Rouge, Blue Fox.
Right from the late ’60s in Madras, when a young Kitto walked into a Duke Ellington rehearsal session, jammed with the American jazz hero, and left him impressed (as mentioned in an article on Kitto from 2006 in The Hindu Frontline ), to the time he was invited by Pandit Ravi Shankar to play with him for Queen Elizabeth, Kitto pretty much forged his own path. After the jazz scene of the ’70s began to dissipate, a lot of musicians from the period began to migrate to more fruitful ventures. Louis Banks, for instance, made a name for himself in Bollywood and by writing ad jingles. Others went the way of fusion, melding and merging Indian motifs with western arrangements. Kitto, though, stuck to his guns, at the cost of financial success, possibly even fame. He had aligned himself to the idea of bebop, which he’d discovered at an early age and taught himself to play, remaining true to it till the very end. He continued to perform, while also teaching the guitar, to sustain himself and to keep the form alive.
He was, to an extent, under-appreciated during his time, not quite getting the kind of recognition he perhaps deserved. That said, he’s been the subject of a handful of documentary films, including Finding Carlton (2012) by Susheel Kurien, which traces the history of jazz in India through the eyes of Kitto.
Kurien, who’s been living in New York since 1981, was intrigued by the subject of jazz here while learning to play jazz guitar himself. Upon hearing a recording of Kitto playing, Kurien decided to place him at the centre of the film he was conceiving. He couldn’t track him down though, until an article in the travel section of The New York Times pointed him to Chowringhee Bar at Grand Hotel, where Kitto played regularly.
Like so many greats of our times, Kitto held strong beliefs on matters of art. It wouldn’t, perhaps, be all that wrong to claim he was a purist, a traditionalist, when it came to jazz. It could be self-belief, conviction, and passion, or it could be rigidity; either way, he’d found his calling: bebop. He decided to play music he liked, without compromising his ideals as an artist. “See, he came out of that time… and I feel it was built into him,” says Amyt Datta, the virtuosic and experimental guitar player from Kolkata who plays for Skinny Alley and Pinknoise, in addition to his own music.
Datta, himself a vastly influential figure in the world of guitar playing, probably falls in a different ideological camp, experimenting with different styles of music, even veering into the avant-garde from time to time. But he speaks of Kitto only with respect and reverence. As a measure of the man’s impact, Datta too learnt under his tutelage briefly. They were practically neighbours, and their relationship blossomed from a student-teacher one into one of friendship; it progressed from Datta referring to him as “Sir” to simply “Carl”.
“He’s representative of a person, of a character, who walks the path which may be narrow, but he walks it on his own terms,” says Datta. “Carl had the bebop in his mind. It was fantastic and incredible. One thing’s for sure: there’s no authentic bebop jazz guitar player in the country anymore. I don’t know anyone who plays like that.”
Kurien points out that Kitto’s legacy can truly be highlighted by the impact he’s had on guitar players (both well-known and obscure) in India, across different disciplines. “His students are all over the country, playing professionally. I got emails from guitar players who’re on the payrolls of A.R. Rahman’s studio in Chennai. They said everything they know, they’d learnt from ‘Carlton Sir’. He’d taught them foundational rules. This is the hidden Carlton no one knows about. His legacy, really, is that he has taught guitar players in India to play using the techniques… the formality and rigour of a traditional jazz guitar education. And it’s even being used by people who don’t play jazz,” he says. Even across different genres, the fundamentals of Kitto’s teaching, according to Kurien, inform the quality of the instrumentalist.
The very last production made on Kitto is a short film by youth portal 101India. It’s a glimpse into the humble means within which Kitto lived (a small two-room apartment) and a technicolour spectacle of the jazz era in Kolkata through Kitto’s curious, almost mischievous eyes. “What is this crap you’re playing?” he recounts asking Banks, with a wide grin.
Cyrus Oshidar, the creative head at 101India, tells me how the film is a way of tracing cultural remnants of the past. Kitto, really, is symbolic of that bygone era, beyond his own formidable legacy, and the film — both wistful and joyous — provides one last peek into a long forgotten time. “There was so much romance to it. There was this swinging nightclub scene once,” says Oshidar. “It was multicultural and diverse and wonderful. The magic of that era, the things that are gone, they become so much more romantic.”
That scene doesn’t really exist today. In fact, according to Datta, it never did. He feels it’s partly a myth that’s been amplified over time, with only a handful of places supporting the form. “The system never looked out for it,” he says. What does live on, though, is the great legacy of Carlton Kitto, in his extraordinary ability to emote, and in the form of all the students who imbibed a part of him. Kurien is certain that, financially at least, Kitto would have been far more successful if he’d taken the leap into different, more commercially viable styles of music. But how much does that really matter?
“He lived the way he wanted to. He was happy.”
Akhil Sood is a freelance culture writer from New Delhi who wishes he’d studied engineering instead.
Published - December 03, 2016 04:25 pm IST
