Chances are any regular of Kolkata’s Park Street will have walked past Paul Mallick, an elderly, tall, bespectacled man with ruddy countenance, without really noticing him. But for those who have heard him play the saxophone, say, at Moulin Rouge, where he played till September of this year, he is anything but inconspicuous. The strains of ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head’ or ‘Strangers in the night’ could transport you straight to the 70s, recalling a Calcutta of cabarets and all-night parties. But with most audiences today more intent on their phones and food and more fond of Bollywood pop, who would Mallick play for now?

When I met the 81-year-old Mallick at Kolkata’s Bengal Club, where he had an evening session, he was sprightly despite seeming a bit frail — he had had an operation a few weeks ago. Clutching his saxophone like a dear companion, he told me slowly, “Communion with the audience is what I crave for.” Does he get it? Not much these days — not with the persistent clamour for Bollywood pop, which almost amounts to an aesthetic policing of sorts. It’s one of the reasons he has quit Moulin Rouge now, he says.

But there was a time when “after 8.30 p.m., we would play pop, classical, jazz standards.” Mallick is talking, of course, of the famed nightlife of Park Street in the 70s, when he had begun his career under trumpeter Ronnie Lyke at Firpos’s in 1969. Back then, after 9 p.m., restaurants like Mocambo, Moulin Rouge, Blue Fox and Magnolia would claim their place in the night, harking back to their glory days of the Raj. “They knew,” says Mallick of the regulars, as if the knowledge of jazz and blues was a secret the band shared with the audience. And in those magic hours, the audience would become collaborators, matching every beat on the dance floor: “They knew the dances… rumba, samba, tango, cha-cha-cha, foxtrot, quickstep. You could not cheat them.”

If all this sounds nostalgic, Mallick is anything but. He remembers the heyday — dotted with figures like Mallick’s teachers, Bobby Banks and Joe Pereira, and contemporaries like the late and exalted Carlton Kitto — with a matter-of-factness. In 1974, Pereira, who played at Trincas, had found Mallick a place in a five-piece band at The Park Hotel. Thus started a long association with the band and the establishment that lasted until 1996. Then, he played at Taj Bengal and took up various gigs around town, including the jazz shows Kitto arranged every year. From 2002, for the next 16 years, Mallick was a regular at Moulin Rouge.

Mallick’s present frustration is not directed at a specific group. But he dislikes the vapidity of formulaic Bolly-pop, and the demand of restaurant owners to cater exclusively to mainstream tastes to ensure cultural and economic security. And he rues the missing dance floors.

Kiss on the cheek

Mallick mourns the dissolution of a community and a specific breed of musicians. He remembers Kitto, “He used to write everybody’s music in the band. Whatever little jazz I learned, I learned from him.”

From being the only baritone saxophonist in Calcutta, when he was playing alongside Kitto in the early 80s, Mallick took up the alto saxophone, more suited to standalone performances and more discernible by the layperson, because the call-and-response community of musicians was dwindling — “Who’s going to play with me?” he asks, describing himself as possibly the last of the 70s’ musicians.

But the song is not dead. “There is still a demand for Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Tony Brent,” says Mallick. He tells the story of a young girl who had, many years ago when he used to play at Flurys, come up to him at the end of a Jim Reeves number and planted a kiss on his cheek. She had grown up on her father’s old Reeves records and was euphoric to hear the song played live by Mallick.

Mallick is sorry that these listeners are gone; the fellowship between musicians and diners and dancers who reciprocated the dulcet waves of his saxophone in kind or kindness. But Mallick plays on. If the audiences come back, he will be around to savour them, play for them.

The Kolkata-based writer is a Felix Scholar from Oxford.