Joe Pereira (Jazzy Joe)

Joe Pereira started performing in 1941, aged only 14, in a band in Lahore’s Stiffle’s Hotel fronted by his cousin, the legendary Sebastian D’Souza.  After spending much of his career in Lahore, Delhi and Calcutta, Pereira returned to Bombay in the 1980s and helped train a bunch of enthusiastic hornmen (and hornwomen) who performed occasionally as the Jazz Junkeys. After Partition, Pereria played with the Johnny Baptist band in Bombay and Rudy Cotton in Delhi, before joining an outfit in Calcutta headed by the Russian violinist Walter Yeshin. In 1957, he began to head his own band at the Blue Fox on Park Street.

 

Back in Bombay, many still remember his turn conducting the Foottappers Band at the 1984 Jazz Yatra, leading the group through his composition Flight of the Raga, based on Yaman. Like so many of his contemporaries, he also played in the film studios, and was an assistant to the composers Shankar-Jaikishen.