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He made jazz under air raids - and built an Indian city's music scene
In 1940s Calcutta (now Kolkata), as Japanese air raids rattled the city, a group of musicians travelled by horse carriage to a recording studio, dodging sirens.
The building was exposed, its only defence hand-dug trenches. At each siren wail, the musicians were trained to dive for cover - sometimes mid-session.
At the centre of it all was Kumar Chunder, or KC, Sen.
He would go on to become one of the city's most influential - and largely forgotten - cultural figures: a war correspondent, jazz bandleader and, most notably, the founder of Band Wagon, a pioneering talent agency that helped shape modern Kolkata's music scene.
That wartime recording, whose proceeds went to the East India War Fund, reflected Sen's defining instinct - making and managing music amid chaos. Pressed as a 78 rpm disc, it featured songs like The Good Ship Victory and There Comes a Time. It was a commercial and philanthropic success, earning official praise and continuing to raise funds for years - a lasting testament to his refusal to let war silence music.
Born in 1919, Sen straddled two worlds. On his mother's side, he was descended from Lt Gen Sir Edward Barnes, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo; on his father's, from the 19th-Century Bengali reformer Brahmananda Keshub Chandra Sen.
He grew up in Kolkata, moving between a convent school and a prestigious Jesuit boys' school where he first discovered music while cleaning instruments in the music room.
Music ran through the household. His eldest sister Moneesha was a concert pianist; his sister Pamela a prima ballerina; and the youngest, Bunny, a regular voice on All India Radio.
As a teenager, Sen made his debut on Park Street - the city's swinging cultural hub - performing at the San Souci Theatre. A pianist and guitarist, he emerged as a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and jazz bandleader.
Sen was a jack of many trades.
A gifted athlete, he became the first Indian to win the Macklin Sculls - a prestigious single sculling race - at the Calcutta Lake Club in 1938.
After an engineering apprenticeship, he left for the Burmese front as a Reuters correspondent. In Lashio, in present-day Myanmar (then Burma), shrapnel from a Japanese air raid left a dent in his helmet - a stark reminder of how close he came to death.
Even during the war, he continued composing music.
These years of collaboration led to several of his original compositions being pressed into 78 rpm shellac records.
Among them was Why Should I Dream, recorded with Bombay-based crooner Lorna Shortland, Goan guitarist Garney Nyss and his group, The Aloha Boys. The band also backed Mickie Hennessey, who later turned a Sen-penned song into a professional singing contract in South Africa.
Another composition, Moonlight in Hawaii, predated a Hollywood film of the same name by several years. He later recalled in his memoir that he had written the song as an undergraduate, adding that when the film eventually appeared, "my record received an artificial boost on the 'pop' market".
By the end of World War Two, Sen had returned to Kolkata as head of programming at All India Radio.
He also formed the Casual Club Quintet, earning an honourable mention in Melody Maker, one of Britain's most influential music weeklies.
His influence was now expanding beyond performance.
With backing from people including the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, he founded the Calcutta Swing Club - an institution that, for jazz, echoed what the Calcutta School of Music was doing for Western classical traditions in the city.
At the city's New Empire Theatre, he orchestrated several "big-band concerts", he wrote, flying in Bombay-based maestros like Ken Mac and Sonny Lobo, and vocalists like Jean Statham and Pamela McCarthy. For a brief while, he also assumed management of the Golden Slipper, a legendary Calcutta nightclub.
But his most transformative endeavour came in 1953 with the launch of Band Wagon.
It began as an offshoot of his sports magazine Sportlight, before evolving into a glossy weekly combining showbusiness and sport by 1957. Band Wagon helped professionalise Park Street's nightlife, turning its "watering holes" into platforms for emerging local talent.
A regular columnist for the iconic youth magazine Junior Statesman, Sen used this growing ecosystem to spotlight performers through weekly Sunday auditions at the New Empire Theatre. These fed into four annual Band Wagon showcases - the Easter Parade, July's Birthday Revue, October's Puja Pageant and the Christmas Revue.
For a generation of musicians, Band Wagon became a launchpad.
"I began playing music at 15," recalled Vivian Hansen, a former crooner at Park Street's Trincas restaurant.
KC Sen was the only promoter of local talent back then. I started in 1959 during his Band Wagon days, singing once a week for 10 rupees.
Veteran guitarist Cyrus Tata remembered being put on stage at just 12, at one of the Sunday Band Wagon shows.
Between 1953 and 1968, Band Wagon helped build a thriving live music circuit, producing homegrown artistes such as Marie Sampson and Shirley Churcher, who would later find success in the West.
Sen's influence also extended to Tollywood, Bengal's film industry.
His most famous cinematic contribution occurred over a tête-à-tête at his Park Street flat, where he introduced filmmaker Satyajit Ray to cabaret performer Vicky Redwood (née Devika Halder). Ray would go on to cast her in his acclaimed film Mahanagar: The Big City (1963).
The curtain finally fell on Sen's long association with Kolkata with a poignant "signing-off" radio broadcast in October 1975.
He later retired to Ashford in the UK, where he died in 2007.
His sons, Neil and Robin, followed in their father's footsteps in performing for The Cavaliers and recording one of Calcutta's earliest 45 rpm pop pieces, Love is a Mango (1967).
"He could recognise talent," Robin recalled from his home in Sydney. "If he saw even a little, he would work to turn it into something - whether they could stand up, sing or dance.
And on the Calcutta scene, there had to be somebody who knew what the hell they were talking about. That was him.
Arka Chakraborty is a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London, researching Kolkata's Anglophone music scene
Source: BBC
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