How India’s long-running Jazz Yatra festival challenged the ideological divisions of the Cold War

Three human heads emerge from vibrant hues of molten lava and are arranged to form another head. Three heads, with one ear, four eyes, and three noses, feature black, brown and beige complexions. This uncanny assemblage is bound together by a single blue turban. One of the men plays a trumpet, another a baritone saxophone, and the third a nāgasvaram, the double-reed aerophone of South India. Above the turban, an all-caps text proclaims: “A Festival of Indo•Euro•Afro•American Music.”

This is an advertisement for a week-long 1980 event in Bombay, India, called the Jazz Yatra, which promises to feature both “jazz and Indian classical” music with “live performances by the greatest musicians in the world!”

The artwork for this poster was made by a Polish artist for an Indian jazz festival that featured a plurality of American performers. In this image, we find a portrait of what I call the Jazz Yatra’s jazz intercommunalism: the utopian vision of “Indo-Euro-Afro-American music”.

Over the course of its 25-year history, Jazz Yatra became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. Yātra means “pilgrimage” in Sanskrit. Between 1978 and 2003, this Indian festival established itself as a major musical pilgrimage site of the late twentieth century....

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