Jazz traversed India and influenced audiences and music makers of all backgrounds, and successful musicians navigated this diversity conscious of its business potentials, engaging commercial realities and estimating audience demand as necessary. The African American vocal group Plantation Quartet used Hollywood representations of black American music to promote identification with global culture. Performing in Calcutta, Bombay, and elsewhere, this group used Hollywood film songs and so-called darky promotional images to contextualize their performances in blackface minstrel and antebellum plantation histories. The most successful musicians in the 1920s and 1930s often exhibited keen business skills and marketing savvy. Ken Mac first heard jazz in 1921 at the Cavalry School in Saugor (modern Sagar) while on holiday, and he later became a key jazz figure in India. The school is located in interior India, far from the larger urban centers more typically associated with the development of jazz and other transnational commercial enterprises. After this performance, Mac learned to play the drum set by listening to imported gramophone recordings from the United States, and his music studies at the Lawrence Royal Military School in Sanawar provided resources for his early successes in jazz performance. Saxophonist Micky Correa started his work in the jazz music business in Lahore and moved to Bombay in 1938 to perform at elite venues and network with African American musicians. His band's success in Lahore required learning effective advertising strategies to target the European consumer base. This chapter will address the work of Correa, Mac, the Plantation Quartet, and other jazz musicians, and articulate how sound technologies, film, entrepreneurial activity, and exoticism associated with African American musicians supported popular music in the 1920s and 1930s.

On November 10, 1934, the Plantation Quartet (sometimes called the Deep South Boys or the Taj Quartet) performed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Bombay. The group was composed of African American jazz musicians Creighton Thompson, Crickett Smith, Rudy Jackson, and Roy Butler. The quartet sang Hollywood representations of black music and dressed in costumes that depicted plantation life in the southern United States.