Kolkata :
For more than 50 years now, his fingers have strummed the bass guitar, while his deep sonorous voice has kept pace with lead singers.
Noel Martin is 70 today and Park Street recognizes him as the senior most performing pop musician, who is hardly ever absent from his perch between 9pm and 11.30pm at Trincas, which remains a rare place where English pop music still rules the roost at dinner hour, a reminder of the heady Sixties.
Immediately after completing 56 years of existence in June, the Trincas management has now decided to felicitate Noel.
This is perhaps the first time that a senior musician will be publicly feted.
Naturally, hardcore Trincas fans and fellow musicians are thrilled. Music happened quite early to Noel. He started playing bass guitar at the Great Eastern Hotel, inspired by none less than Arthur Gracias. After being there for two years, Park Street beckoned. As the Flintstones rolled into Trincas, Noel joined them and rolled in with his bass guitar and unmistakable voice that jammed like a house on fire with Eddy Ranger, the lead singer. Bands have come and bands have gone, and Noel, too, has punctuated his stints with stops at Blue Fox (where he played with Carlton Kitto) and Mocambo (where he was a part of the electrifying psychedelics), but Trincas and its trademark ambience that the likes of Usha Uthup and Nondon Bagchi swear by has remained Noel’s most comforting shelter forever.
After the tea room of Mr Trincas got converted into a licensed nightclub in 1959, run jointly by Om Prakash Puri and Ellis Joshua, Trincas simply set Park Street on fire with sensations like Eve, Molly, Jenny, Linda, Brenda (who later went on to marry Jaideep Mukherjee), Usha Iyer (later Uthup), Vivian Hanson, Benny Rozario of the Elite Aces fame and crooner Flora.
Noel came to Trincas in the 60s and played with almost all of them. Usha Uthup, with whom he was a regular accompanist, remembers him as a person “who naturally had rhythm in his body and a way with his guitar that made the singer want to sing. As a new singer in a saree, completely foreign in the Trincas locale, Noel simply put me at ease, one of the finest humans I have come across… an institution.” Bagchi, too, had only praise for Noel. “Music is worship for him, you don’t see the likes of him any more. He plays with such harmony behind the lead singer, something that can be counted as a rare gift. I have jammed with Noel often and I am so happy that he will finally be recognized for the relentless work that he has put in.
Kolkata is gradually losing its original brand of musicians who practiced English pop music, and the likes of Noel are becoming rare. I can only say that the felicitation is very well deserved,” he said. ‘Black Magic Woman’, the Fleetwood Mac tune made popular by Carlos Santana, is perhaps the best loved of all the songs that Noel sings.
Sitting in his modest drawing room deep inside the Wellesley 2nd Bye Lane, Noel sings away, strumming his bass, by way of practice.
Today, as part of Sweet Agitation, he performs along with Cornel Bloud (singer), Candice Gray (singer) Gavin Keys (lead guitarist), Dibayan Banerjee (keyboard) and Nigel Gomes (drums). “I am lucky to have played and jammed with several generations of music-makers on Park Street. The scintillating 60s are no more, when so many corporate head offices were here and the place buzzed with young upwardly mobile professionals who looked only for Western pop. So we re-created Frank Sinatra, Cliff Richards, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, Harry Belafonte and Bruce Springsteen. The patrons reciprocated with equal verve.
Today, tastes have changed and so Hindi and Bengali music are played in the evening tea time hours. It is only after 9pm that we come in to play for the dinner clientele that still comes here for Western pop alone,” Noel says.
Deepak and Shashi Puri, who run Trincas today, feel it is because of musicians like Noel that Trincas still remains a class apart. “As Trincas moves from strength to strength, it is a duty on our part to also felicitate its makers. Noel, being the seniormost, comes first on the list,” Deepak signs off.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Kolkata / by Jhimli Mukherjee, TNN /July 11th, 2015