Colin ’s AIDS awareness jazz tour to India: January 13-19.

[Guest guest]

strums a jazz swansong.

Outgoing US secy of state to host musicians on AIDS mission to India

K.P. NAYAR

Washington, Dec. 11: Outgoing US secretary of state Colin 's

swansong for India will be a tour by some of America's jazz greats

from his black community next month to promote awareness about AIDS

in India.

On Tuesday, with little over a month before demitting office,

will host the jazz musicians going to India at a function in the

state department's Treaty Room. The group will be in India from

January 13 to 19.

Among the jazz greats going to India is Ravi Coltrane, who is no

Indian, despite his misleading first name.

He was named after sitarist Ravi Shankar, who gave lessons in Indian

music in the 1960s to Coltrane senior, the late jazz legend and

saxophonist, Coltrane, one of the most influential musicians

ever. Although died when Ravi was only two, his mother Alice

Coltrane, a classically-trained pianist, continued to influence her

son with her jazz experiments infused with Indian music.

The upcoming tour of the jazz group has been put together by Black

Entertainment Television's (BET) Jazz Channel, MTV-India and the

Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a Los Angeles-based non-profit

educational institution founded in 1986 to fill gaps in arts

education created by budget cuts by the government.

The state department is partnering these organisers in executing the

tour which will include concerts in Mumbai and New Delhi as well as

jazz lessons and HIV/AIDS outreach programmes. Other locations in

Indian cities are also under consideration.

Like human rights or child labour in the 1990s, the AIDS threat in

India is the latest issue to catch the fancy of philanthropists and

non-government organisations in the US.

Microsoft chief Bill Gates is the best example of this trend: his non-

profit foundation has already committed millions of dollars to the

fight against AIDS in India.

By hosting the India-bound jazz group as one of his last possible

public functions dealing with India, may be making amends for

his four-year record as America's top diplomat.

Of all the men in the Bush administration's senior set-up,

alone made Indians in government see red.

His first major structured meeting with former external affairs

minister Jaswant Singh was a disaster and their mutual allergy has

been in evidence till now, with Singh recently saying what he thought

of the outgoing secretary of state in an interview.

last year annoyed Indians by being effusive about Indo-US

friendship on a visit to New Delhi: he then went to Islamabad and

declared that Pakistan was a major non-NATO ally of the US without

giving any inkling of what was afoot to India.

's meeting with external affairs minister Natwar Singh shortly

after the new Indian government came to office did not melt the ice

either. But the Americans insist that it was because Singh gave

a lecture, as is his wont.

Ravi Coltrane will be joined in the upcoming India tour by another

jazz great, Earl Klugh. Others going to India next month as part of

the tour are Al Jerreau, Duke and graduate jazz students from

the Thelonious Monk Institute.

The tour is to have the theme Indians and Americans Together Against

HIV/AIDS.

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