[BITList] Waah, Bay-tee!

[John Feltham]

> 
> FORWARDED  FROM A  FRIEND  NOW  IN  THE  USA,----   PLEASE  SEE   ESPECIALLY THOSE  FROM  DOW  HILL.
>  ---      SHE  WAS  A    LOVELY  LADY  AND A  GREAT   SINGER------WE WILL MISS  HER.--i  heard  her  singh
> 
>      JACK
> 
> We must have missed all this while we were there!!!    --comment  from my  friend in USA  who  sent  this,
> 
> 
> PAM CRAINE : the last of the divas
> 
> Mocambo independent India’s first nightclub,where a 17-year-old chanteuse named Pam Crain belted out numbers with a six-piece band led by Anton Menezes. She sang out one number after another and this Nancy Sinatra song is what I heard.
> 
> You keep saying you got something for me
> Something you call love but confess
> You been messing where you shouldn't have been messing
> And now someone else is getting all your best
> Well these boots are made for walking
> And that's just what they'll do
> One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.
> 
> On 14th. August as she breathed her last,the independence day fervour with the tricolour walked all over her without, a proper obit to go by.
> 
> Pam Craine was born to an Anglo Indian mother in Calcutta. She never spoke of her father.At the age of 13 when she was in the boarding at Dow Hill in Kurseong, she was introduced to the piano. “That’s about it,” she says. But they were allowed to take back the discs she bought in a small shop in New Market. “I was consumed by jazz”, her favourite singers being Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone. She was “very lucky” to have performed with some of the best jazz musicians the country produced. 
> 
> Crain had begun her career at a masala dosa joint named Neera’s on the Chowringhee and perhaps it was fated that she would subsequently fall in love with Carnatic music, impossible as it may sound. But it was Mocambo which was her Waterloo.It is here that she battled to be what she was. She wanted to become the voice of jazz and western music in Calcutta. And that she became.
> 
> The place is almost synonomys with her name and it seemed that Mocambo was created for her. She was appointed in 1955 before Mocambo opened in April 1956.The standards set by the restaurant were far above other restaurants in Park Street. A German architect designed the interiors and Kothari the owner got an Italian chef flown down to garnish the menu. Kitty Bryanan, a British fashion designer, made the dresses that Pam Crain used to wear at Mocambo,they were mermaid-like, flared at the bottom,while the dance floor was of reinforced glass imported from Belgium, with coloured psychedelic lights below. Only the crème de la crème would dine there, and dinner jackets were mandatory.” 
> 
> Pam had to be groomed because when Mocambo opened it was a very posh nightclub. A first generation Anglo Indian lady called Kitty Brinand, a fashion designer who used to run what we call a boutique today, was appointed. Pam was taken there and new outfits were designed for her. A favourite of hers was a fishtail dress and they made her half a dozen of those. They got her a hairdresser to style her hair differently. And when Mocambo opened she was an instant hit, a celebrity. She sang in Mocambo for more than 10 years. They were a six- piece band and Pam would pick the latest in pop music from the ' 50s. They would start around 7.30pm and go on till 1 or 2am, especially on weekends.
> 
> The office returners, the anglophile family, beaming schoolgirls, giggling college puerile,young adolescent college boys with bulge, nuns  wearing grey wimples from Loreto; were all her fans. They would come up to her and gush about how they wanted to touch her. And the fashionable ladies of Calcutta wanted to look like her. She would sing at Mocambo’s in her fishtail dress almost looking the part of a mermaid without the tail but with a voice that rang far when the doorman opened it, just a bit, for the early guests to leave, for a whiff of her voice to evade the Park Street evening air.
> 
> Pam was the Diva of Park Street, the jazz singer who has seen the rise of Park Street as the hottest night spot of the sub-continent. Pam left Mocambo somewhere in 1966 by the time she had met Don Saigal and had got married. Louiz Banks,the famous musician met her in the 1970s and invited her to join his band, the Louiz Banks Brotherhood, in Blue Fox. Blue Fox with its famous blue neon fox was second to Mocambo but Pam made it her stage. She had never uttered the reason for her leaving Mocambo but stories have it that it was a difference between the owner and her over the fees. When she was signed, she was a ‘nobody’ and was paid a pittance. As the contract of ten years ended she requested her rightful singing fees. The owner felt that they have created her and she has nowhere to go. This led to their parting and the fall of Mocambos ‘family’ crowd turning it into a bar.
> 
> The year was 1978. I had joined St. Xavier’s College and many of my friends found their newfound ‘wings’. They gathered in the evening for drinks and partied till late. The only time I have visited Park Street in the evening was with my parents and that too during Christmas. My first trip to Park Street, my first walk down Park Street in the evening happened soon after I joined college. I heard that there was this beautiful blonde with the most amazing figure, unbelievable style and more than anything else, a great voice. My first memory of Pam Crain was her coming down the steps of Blue Fox in her devastating hairstyle and black and silver shimmering gown.
> 
> A few days later my friend Amitabh told me that Vijay Mallay has invited us all for a ddd:drink, dance and dinner at Mocambos to celebrate his birthday. Yes,Vijay Mallay of the Kingfisher fame was in Room 32 when I was in 16 at Commerce in St. Xavier’s. There was no reason for my invite but I presumed it was to get in the good books of Jorris, as I was the General Secretary in the a-political College Union. I accepted the invitation not for Vijay but for Pam. 
> 
> I heard her a couple of times and became an ardent fan; she was so amazing. When I think back, she was the greatest jazz diva of our country. The greatest. She was way ahead of her times in India. She was a free spirit and she loved to improvise. She was an outstanding beauty. She had beauty, brains and talent. She was a great lyric writer. She wrote many songs like Cool Me Down and Reason.
> 
> Sometimes in the late beginning of 80s she left for Bombay to join The Louiz Banks Band. But it was not the same. Bombay did not receive her as Calcutta had. The last time she sang there was in in the 1990s. After that she moved back to Calcutta again. But it was in Bombay that she met her alter ego. One of her favourite singer was Betty Carter. Betty Carter was inspiration for her. And this one time in Bombay at the Jazz Yatra, Betty Carter was performing and Pam sat in the audience crying. Later she went backstage to meet Betty with a painting of hers that Louiz Banks had made and given Pam so she could get it signed by her. Betty Carter hugged her and said she couldn't believe that there was someone in India who sang her songs and was so much into her. Next day she called Pam over and they had lunch together and then went out shopping. I think that must have been the best day in Pam's life.
> 
> She was a very shy and private person off- stage and very home bound. Much of her time at home was spend in cooking Anglo Indian cuisine, listening to music playing Scrabble and innocent gossip. Pam’s mother was quite a seamstress and Pam knew how to cut cloth and design them. Pam and her friend Brenda Lilley had a boutique, Madame Butterfly, on Free School Street which was a place for all fashionista, including the actress Moon Moon Sen.
> 
> The nicest thing about Pram is her sincerity. Although she keeps travelling, her daughter has moved to the UK and her mother lives in Las Vegas, Crain returns to the city of her birth where she feels her roots are. When she returned from Singapore a few years back, she watched Mocambo’s being re-built. The crowds are still the same, she feels, but she admits managers of establishments expect the music to play softly in the background. “But just as the people at the restaurant talk business, we want to talk our business too. It is very difficult for a musician to do anything that is not coming out with heartfelt power.”
> 
> Park Street lost its voice with the passing of its original diva,Pam Crain.The 80 year old died in Calcutta on Wednesday morning following a cardiac arrest triggered by respiratory distress. She is survived by husband Don Saigal and other family members.
> ~
> Listen to Pam Craine :http://youtu.be/SZ2-LtufohM






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