Ethnic Nepali Is “India’s Jazz King”

A profile of keyboardist and composer Louis Banks, born Dambar Bahadur Budapirti, whose grandfather Bakhat Bahadur Budapirti composed the Nepali national anthem and whose father moved the family from Kathmandu to Calcutta in the 1930s.

Then 64 and based in Mumbai for about 25 years, Banks was described as a central figure in Indian jazz, with more than 8,000 jingles and thousands of songs, many for Bollywood films, to his name. The piece covered his work in jazz, Indo-jazz fusion and music drawing on Himalayan instruments and melodies.

This page summarizes an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018). The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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