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In The New York Times, Somini Sengupta goes to Calcutta’s famous restaurant Mocambo:

My mother went to Mocambo to listen to Doris Day covers. I went to Mocambo for Fish à la Diana.

Mocambo opened its doors in 1956, a European oasis of glamour and jazz on Park Street, Calcutta’s famous cabaret row. Its second-generation owner, Nitin Kothari, called it independent India’s first nightclub, which is plausible, even if impossible to verify. There was a German architect, an Italian manager and, soon after its opening, a 17-year-old chanteuse named Pam Crain, who wore a French evening gown and sang standards with Anton Menezes’ six-piece band. “She had a good voice, she was very good-looking,” Mr. Kothari, 61, recalled. “Very glamorous.”

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Talking of Mocambo and Pam Crain, here’s a story The Telegraph, Calcutta, ran last year on the singers and musicians who used to play in Calcutta in the 60s and 70s:

Carlton Kitto, one of the most popular jazz guitarists in the city, began his musical journey at Moulin Rouge in the early Seventies. “The restaurant was owned by a French lady called Delilah who would sing along with our band Carlton Kitto Jazz Ensemble. Cancan dancers would delight the guests later in the evening,” recollects Carlton.

After performing for two years at Moulin Rouge, Kitto moved a few blocks ahead to Mocambo, where Pam Crain, the queen of crooners, made her debut in the Sixties. The interiors of the place remain frozen in time with its red Rexine sofas and continental fare but the voices that drew an elite audience are gone. Even as Calcutta rock bands and Bangla bands take over Park Street, why is the blaring of a trumpet, or a blues note from a saxophone, still missing? Where are the Anglo-Indian and Goan musicians who made Park Street the capital of Indian nightclub music from the mid-Fifties to early Seventies?

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