Amerigo Gazaway
Yasiin Gaye: The Departure (Side One)

Welcome to our second celebration of the sounds of Bombay Disco, which digs deeper into the recordwallah shops in the bazaars of India. As fans of our first collection will recall, disco arrived in India in 1979, shortly after its mainstream popularity had peaked in the West. Disco songs remained in vogue throughout the subcontinent for a dozen years, in many ways because of the "cabaret scene" or"item number," a mainstay in South Asian cinema that dates back to the 1920s. Back then, these scenes depicted traditional courtesans or nautch (dancing) girls, but by the early 1960s dance sequences became much more surreal, with visuals inspired by Busby Berkley and music infused with jazz, Latin, and rock 'n roll. This tradition continued with an East-meets-West fusion of funk, disco and electro, to the hip-hop and EDM influences popular in South Asian films today.