Band of brothers

Who could have imagined? That too in these days of distortions on electric guitars or mixing and making entire scores on a PC. But Anurag Kashyap and Amit Trivedi thought it possible. Music director Trivedi created the cult song 'Emosanal Atyachar' in Dev D with the help of brass bands, a struggling breed of musicians. The song was performed by BandMaster Rangeela and Rasila and fired music charts all over the country. It created even more ripples as people were taken by surprise -- the usually only-wedding-procession musicians who are just supposed to make you dance while remaining obscure were star performers.
But the real story is this: not everyone gets to feature in Bollywood, although music from Hindi films has been a hot favourite with almost all bands for ever since one can remember, and survival is a battle. Ask Babu of the Chamundeshwari Brass Band and he says with a faraway, forlorn look in his eyes, "My father was also a musician with a band, so you can say I have been attached indirectly to the profession for the last 50 years. Back then, there was so much respect for bands. Now the glory days are over." He has been playing the trumpet with brass bands for the past decade.
The band is thirty years old and now has its premises near Sepings Road. Its small room is brightly painted in orange and blue, colours which match those of the dazzling livery. Babu and his band members are very fond of their uniforms -- they have two sets for the year -- and it is quite interesting to watch them deck up. This ritual begins with the jacket with jazzy golden zari. Then come special trousers, a bulky belt, sparkling cap and a boot lookalike that just needs to be wrapped around the leg and fixed with Velcro to complete the ensemble.
The band members, instruments and dresses jostle for space in that tiny space. Manjunath, whose family owns the band, says, "Business is fine only during season, like the marriage season during November to January." Babu pipes in enthusiastically, "And during Ganapathi festival, we have work continuously for 20 days! We are around 40 members, but during the season, we bring many more from suburbs." But his excitement dims as he adds that six months of the year are barren.
Yet, their eyes light up when they show us their instruments which include trumpets, various kinds of drums, clarinet. They play "new hits" like 'Mauja hi mauja', 'Jhoom barabar' and songs from DDLJ or Hum Apke Hain Kaun are all-time favourites.
For such bands which earn much less than Rs 10,000 a show, it is difficult to purchase or even maintain these instruments. Also, they need a "master" to teach them music, and the learning process can take more than a year, sometimes even two.
One of Bangalore's oldest brass bands the New Bharat Brass Band, set up in 1949 by J Swamy and now run by his son S Ramesh Kumar. The city has around a score of such bands, and the story is virtually the same everywhere. These artistes join us at weddings, at felicitations, at launches and even at death, always there but never really visible.

[A story about brass bands that I wrote a few months back]