![]() “It just clicked,” Tata said about that musical encounter almost five decades ago. There were some musicians hanging around, Tata recalls. We felt we were not in the same league.”Īt the meeting, Shankar asked them to play something. “We were just a bunch of college kids who played mostly for the fun of it. The band was taken aback by the invitation, Tata said. They knew about his lineage, that he had jammed with Jimi Hendrix in Los Angeles, and that his debut album had been released by an American label. They had read about him in Junior Statesman, which had interviewed Ananda Shankar after his return from the US earlier that year. A friend asked him if he would like to go and meet Ananda Shankar. Sometime in early 1970, Tata received a call that would change the course of his life. It was while he was in his final year at school that High Noon was formed: “I had been in a few bands before but with High Noon I felt we had a good thing going.” His former bandmates have long moved to Australia, but Cyrus Tata, now 65, has thrown in his lot with the city of his birth, where he teaches at the Calcutta School of Music. The band’s drummer and lead vocalist Razmick Priantz was Armenian, Ninian Robinson was the obligatory Anglo-Indian in the pack, Debendra Mahalonobis ticked the Bong box, while its lead guitarist was a Parsi. Named after Fred Zinnemann’s classic 1952 Western, High Noon could well have featured in an ad celebrating Calcutta’s ethnic diversity.
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