Today Louis J Pinto, 37, is an established jazz musician in Pakistan and has been a regular feature in four seasons of Coke Studio. He has performed across continents, collaborated with local and international musicians, and has even started his own music show. That first gig did go well after all.
Refer to him by his formal name, and hardly anyone in Pakistan, or elsewhere, will know whom you are talking about. He is almost always referred to by the moniker "Gumby" - a claymation cartoon character's name that was given to him by a doting neighbour when he was barely a month old. The name has stuck since.
Having performed and collaborated with Pakistani bands like Vital Signs, Zeb and Haniya, Mekal Hassan Band and Noori, he turned his attention to production some three years ago. Most recently, he was in India to perform at the Jazz Utsav.
Gumby comes from a small Goan community in Karachi. Music became a part of everyday life with regular performances with the church choir in the local parish. Starting out, Gumby opted to drop out of school. The move wasn't very well received both by his peers and his mother. "I wanted to quit school and focus on my music in eighth grade. But my mother forced me to at least complete the tenth," says Gumby, who has now taken to mentoring young people in music. "When I started out, it was very difficult. People wouldn't tell you things or encourage you. I felt it was very important for me to give back," says Gumby, frequently digressing to his "life philosophy" through the conversation. "It is always about making money. People want their children to become doctors so that hey have a financially secure future. But what if I become a really bad doctor or an average lawyer? That's what I told my mother initially when I wanted to drop out. If it's about money, I can make money out of this, though it is just a by-product of me following my hobby," recalls Gumby.
Though the bands he has collaborated with until now play pop and rock, Gumby says jazz dominates his sound. "I started out listening to a lot of popular music. Everything from Cliff Richards to The Beatles - that's what my mom would listen to on the phonograph. I started exploring a lot of western classical, a lot of Mozart. Slowly I got introduced to jazz - Dizzy Gillespie and Coltraine and stuff, and started understanding the choice of notes. I realized these people were playing all of improvised stuff, which was fascinating for me. Most of the pop music that I started producing would be very influenced by the improvised material that I would do in my leisure time. That's when I realized that it would be wrong of me to shun the jazz side of things, because in the back of my head, that's what was playing," says Gumby, who admits to getting a lot of ideas for his music while cleaning his house.
Talking of Pakistani jazz, though, Gumby says it still lacks a distinct sound that it can call its own. Besides Amir Zaki, he can name hardly two other people who play the genre. "At the end of the day, you need to put food on the table and if a certain kind of music doesn't help you do that then you revert to doing more popular stuff," says Gumby, who has also composed a few advertising jingles.
Pakistani singers like Junaid Jamshed, with whom Gumby performed the very first time, and more recently, Shiraz Uppal, have given up their musical careers for religion. A number of Muslim artists have been targeted in the Swat region as the Taliban is intolerant of music and performing arts. They find it "un-Islamic". Coupled with that, the mistreatment of religious minorities in the country that has recently come to light, one wonders if things are all that easy. "It hasn't affected me, really. Unlike the rest of the country, Karachi is very diverse, ethnically. You have Parsis, Hindus and Christians there. And of course, the Muslims. You can distinctly tell who is who and they all live in little pockets. Some of them are liberal, some of them aren't. But they all learn to live together. In my community, music, theatre or dance is a part of the culture. It was just very normal for us to play music," says Gumby, who among the Indian artistes, appreciates the likes of A R Rahman, Kailash Kher and Indian Ocean.
On his visit to India, he was most excited about his trip to Goa - his native city that he would see after a gap of 26 years. Having crossed the border on foot, it was an even more surreal feeling for him. "That's how they must have done it in 1947, isn't it?" he says.
For now, he is busy with a production of a couple of pop albums in Pakistan and the creation of a new online portal for the arts. "It is an academic portal...sort of like ebay meets public forum kind of format. People will be able to access localized information about the arts - any kind of art - through that online portal. It's nearly done and is coming along well," says Gumby. One will have to wait to see how it clicks.
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