Welcome to Jazzmandu!: Jazz in Kathmandu
KATHMANDU: With everybody smoking peace pipe, Kathmandu has started rocking again.
By a narrow alleyway in the city’s Lazimpat neighbourhood, a narrow stairway leads to a rather dimly lit chamber. Every evening, the Upstairs Jazz, one of the favourite hangouts of Kathmandu’s Jazz music lovers, attracts the city’s Jazz music aficionados.
“Alright, that was a good one,” Sachin Sachdev, an Indian hotel manager in the city cheers, along with his friend, Vidhya Shrestha, a local singer, as members of Cadenza band belt out one of their favourite Jazz numbers.
Other locals and expatriates sitting on candle-lit couches — sipping their favourite drinks — applaud and cheer, too.
Welcome to Jazzmandu!
Kathmandu, the city famous for its myriad of Hindu and Buddhist temples is fast turning into a city of live music, too, among other means of entertainment.
Thanks to a recent peace agreement aimed at ending a ten-year-old Maoist insurgency, more and more restaurants and bars here are adding live bands like Cadenza on their menus.
Besides featuring local live bands that belt out every thing from slow rock to heavy metals and Nepali/Indian classical to Jazz, Kathmandu has also been hosting Jazzmandu, or the ‘world’s highest Jazz music festival’ since 2002.
The sixth edition is due for coming fall, says Navin Chhetri of the Cadenza band, also the man behind Jazzmandu right since its inception.
“Jazz or music for that matter is such a great, powerful thing; it can change our life especially in these times of turmoil everywhere around us,” he says.
Barely two hundred metres away from Upstairs Jazz, the Red Onion Bar features local solo as well as group bands every midweek and weekend evenings. “People like things that are lively as opposed to virtual fun before television or home theatres,” says Ronesh Shrestha, the proprietor as he lounges and chit-chats with his clients-cum-friends.
That may be the reason why, the tourist district of Thamel comes alive every evening with local live bands and live music — in addition to the dance bars.
There, one gets to see and hear local bands like Electronics, CobWeb etc perform every evening. In another corner by the Royal Palace, the newly opened Kaushi terrace, too, has introduced live music.
At Mokshya resto-bar, in the southern town of Patan, popular Nepali bands like 1974 AD and international band like Stupa belt out Nepali and English rock numbers.
“Live music is such a great thing to have, it makes our evenings so special you can’t explain,” says a jolly local RJ Prashan Shyangden as he sips his favourite cocktail of cola and whiskey.
Echoing the sentiment of hundreds of live music lovers in Kathmandu, he says, “Brother, the more we can have, the merrier.”