Los Amigos

For listeners trooping to Someplace Else to catch Orient Express in the early 2000s, the pull factor was jazz. Over the years, with a revolving line-up of musicians, the one-of-a-kind, big-band Latin jazz ensemble of the country lead by multi-instrumentalist Monojit Dutta lost its ‘jazz’ edge. Somewhere down the line, the band started reverting to a more commercial set-list and sound tailor-made for the party crowd.
As they say, you can take the man out of jazz, but not the other way round. Dutta’s back with a bang. On Tuesday, July 17, his 6-month-old Latin jazz outfit Los Amigos launched their debut album Coleccion Privada (Private Collection), playing a sizzling set of original compositions and a few standards over coffee and cookies at Melange, a newly-opened coffee lounge at New Alipore. And guess what? This one comes free.
On Tuesday, the groove ruled as the band ran through its repertoire of standards and a few original compositions. Dutta — ‘Kochuda’ to his students — on congas, Sanjay Gupta on drums, Mainak ‘Bumpy’ Nagchowdhury on bass and Paddy on keyboards smiled through the songs and at each other, revelling in this music of the moment. Mumbai-based guitar player Binoy Rai (formerly of the jazz-funk band Groove Suppa) wasn’t around with his signature lines, but the foursome more than made up for Rai’s absence. The spacious coffee lounge — a Coffee Pai venture — was brimful with jazz aficionados and Dutta’s students, lapping up the excellent improvisation from the band up close.
“I had been thinking of forming an outfit that would focus on improvisational music,” Dutta says. In January this year, with his long-time percussion student and Orient Express alumnus Sanjay Gupta getting back in town, that seed of a plan started taking shape. “I talked about a full-fledged Latin jazz band to Sanjay and he immediately agreed. Mainak and Paddy joined the fold soon and within a week’s time, we were rehearsing some great music. Binoy came in a little later and the line-up was complete,” Dutta recalls.
The band’s initial gigs were much-anticipated affairs; very well-received by an audience eager to witness some homegrown jazz.
A couple of months down the line, Los Amigos went in for a two-day recording session. Opting for an old-school, live tracking process, the band came up with what would be the seven-song Coleccion Privada; with three originals (written by Dutta) and three standards, including Mongo Santamaria’s Afro Blue and Blue Bossa by Kelly Dorham. The album’s minimalist cover art compliments its music, with the occasional surprise element (a dhol on Blue Bossa). The live feel provides a warmth to the album that’s intrinsic to this music.
While ‘units sold’ seem to be the sole concern of everyone — from artistes to label execs to music stores — Coleccion Privada will be distributed free from Coffee Pai outlets around the city. Why distribute it free? “It’s a movement against record companies and labels, so to speak. Just because you are not ‘saleable’ as defined by a label doesn’t mean that you have to change or stop making the music that you love to play,” says Dutta, “We’ve had enough of that. This is a new beginning.”

Published in t2, The Telegraph, sometime in 2007