Musicians Without Borders

At the height of the Cold War, when American President Dwight Eisenhower dispatches a series of jazz greats to Pakistan as part of a campaign to win it over to the American side, an eight-year-old Izzat Majeed is taken to a Dave Brubeck concert in the city of Lahore by his father, a film producer.He falls in love, as does the rest of Lahore, host to a flourishing film and music industry. But only a short while later, silence cloaks the city under the dictatorship of the religious zealot General Zia Ul- Haq. The city’s musicians close shop and look for other means of earning a living.Meanwhile, young Majeed goes to Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, returns to a palpably depressed Pakistan to teach at university, but fed up, leaves again. He becomes an advisor to the Saudis, eventually starting his own private equity firm, which he sells for a tidy sum.He hasn’t forgotten his early love of music, however, and returns to Lahore in search of the musicians who once worked with his father. There he finds Ghulam Abbas, a cello player, running a tea stall, while Mubarak Ali, a violinist, is selling vegetables from the back of his bicycle. Majeed rounds up a troupe of musicians, names it the “Sachal Jazz Orchestra” (SJO) after the Sufi poet, Sachal Sarmast, and invests £1.2 million of his own money to build a studio in London with the help of technicians from the famed Abbey Road studios. They record several albums without much traction, but it is only when they release their version of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” on Youtube that they have their breakthrough. The idea of classical musicians from the Indian subcontinent playing jazz might seem absurd--in the words of an SJO collaborator, Wynton Marsalis, “these guys count music to 60 to 70 to 80 and we don’t often count past 12.” Nonetheless, the five-beat rhythm cycle of “Take Five” is fairly common in classical Indian music (both Hindustani and Carnatic). Word is Brubeck himself was impressed and declared: “This is the most interesting and different recording of ‘Take Five’ that I have ever heard.”Take a listen:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLF46JKkCNg