[1] They inspired Goan musicians who then absorbed aspects of jazz into the sounds of India’s Hindi film music industry.
An active jazz scene exists today in cities like Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), Pune, Delhi, Goa, and Kolkata.
It began with jazz musicians like Leon Abbey, Crickett Smith, Creighton Thompson, Ken Mac, Roy Butler, Teddy Weatherford (who recorded with Louis Armstrong), and Rudy Jackson who toured India to avoid the racial discrimination they faced in the United States.
As nationalism swept the country, these venues became the refuge of the European and Indian elite, the aristocrats, the moneyed and the public servants.
During this period, musicians such as Chic Chocolate, Frank Fernand, Micky Correa,[6] Rudy Cotton, Hal and Henry Green, Josic Menzie, Pamela McCarthy, and Chris Perry were at the forefront of the burgeoning jazz scene in Bombay, the nerve center of which was at the Taj Mahal hotel ballroom, which became the node of essential transmission of cultural messages between East and West.