Music
Sounds of Kolachi has Changed Our Perspective Toward Music: Ahsan Bari
Sounds of Kolachi music director Ahsan Bari traces the ensemble’s journey from being a hidden gem to an open secret of Pakistani music industry.
Music producer Ahsan Bari has been in the game for too long, but he is most well-known for being the founder of Sounds of Kolachi, a Karachi-based ensemble which began making waves soon after it formed and has quickly become one of the finest in Pakistani music industry.
In a studio apartment in DHA area of Karachi, we sit on the floor in a small air-conditioned room as Ahsan narrates the beginning of the groundbreaking ensemble. Another SoK member Quaid Ahmed joins us.
The journey of Sounds of Kolachi began in 2014. “I wanted to create something substantial and this idea started developing,” he says. He contacted sarangi player Gul Muhammad, sitar player Waqas Hussain and vocalist Sara Haider whom he had already worked with before and Quaid, Natasha Baig, Karavan bassist Sameer Ahmed and Emad Rahman from Kaya band also joined the ever-growing group.
“People started coming in and the ensemble became so huge. It was a small room like the one we are sitting in now and 14 of us would sit there in my house,” he says.
“The idea was to have an ensemble which would include veterans as well as raw, young talent. Super fresh newbies who haven’t learnt anything yet. The resulting sound would have a mature backup but the other participants would add a raw element to it. It’d be a completely new sound.”
With an ensemble this huge, it meant a large number of musicians, belonging to different backgrounds, gathered from every nook and corner of the city. That’s how they came up with the name Sounds of Kolachi.
“Before even we came together, Pakistan American Cultural Center (PACC) director Nasir Saleem encouraged and motivated me a lot. I shared with him what I wanted to do, and he urged that I go for it. We were brainstorming once after a show and I was bringing in a lot of people and it encompassed the spirit of the city. He suggested Kolachi and that’s how we came up with the name Sounds of Kolachi. It’s named so because all of this is happening in Karachi.”
Sounds of Kolachi
© Salt Arts
Ahsan, at the time of the conception of Sounds of Kolachi, was going through “a certain spiritual awakening”, as he put it. “I had begun delving into Sufism and there were some personal incidents too. I went home one day, sat in my room for about 15 days and composed three songs: Allah hi dega, Tarana and Lakh Jatan.”
All three songs became part of their debut album, Ilhaam’, released in 2017, with Allah he dega becoming the most popular track by the ensemble yet. “Because Allah hi Dega from Ilhaam has been the most popular song so nobody paid attention to the rest of the album in which we experimented a lot,” laughs Quaid.
But the music director shares they had no intention of releasing an album in the first place. “I initially wanted SoK to be a live act,” he says. “But the ensemble developed a brilliant cult following and we had to get serious. The 2015 I Am Karachi festival was a turning point. Faraz Anwar had recently returned and we lined up Aahad Nayani and the quality of our sound went up and it became more progressive rock.”
The festival also marked the now-mainstay Nimra Rafiq’s first concert too. Ahsan says they showed him a random video of a girl singing on the stairs of Karachi Arts Council and the next day, she was part of the group. “It was more like a spiritual connection with everyone who was part of the group.”
Mekaal Hasan, who was producing the I Am Karachi concert, met Ahsan and suggested they have an album and that he wanted to produce it. “We had new songs but no money. In 2016, we started recording the album and it took us a long, long time to produce it.”
However, the Illallah vocalist believes Ilhaam didn’t have the sound he wanted. “I wanted a rather raw sound but Mekaal made it more progressive. When I listen to it now, I love it. I feel he had a futuristic approach and it’d take maybe a decade or longer for everyone to understand what he did. It isn’t relevant for now and back then, I wanted an album which would be relevant at the time.”
Ahsan considers himself a student of world music and genres. He is interested in both cultures and languages and wanted Sounds of Kolachi to incorporate that spirit.
“I felt the ensemble shouldn’t become genre-specific, which unfortunately happened. People call Sounds of Kolachi a Sufi band. The idea was to take genres like funk, rock, etc. and play with them, and later on, add different languages too,” he laments. “But you become categorized. It happens naturally when you start getting gigs. People go, ‘we want you to play Sufi music.’ And of course, you have to get paid, pay your bills and keep the group running so you accept.”
Ahsan with other members of his band
© Quratulain binte Khalid
Around the time Ilhaam released, Sounds of Kolachi was selected for Center Stage, a cultural diplomacy program which brings international artists to the US for a series of performances and workshops. The group’s mentor-figure says they knew how the ensemble had formed a cult in Pakistan, but it was in the US that they realized they were doing something huge and substantial.
“We had never seen ourselves the way they talked about us in the articles published there. One, for example, called us the ‘Led Zeppelin of Pakistan’. It was big for us.”
Between Ilhaam, Center Stage showcase and last year’s performance on the red and black national music platform, Sounds of Kolachi quietly but steadily continued to raise its stock. From an underground gem to an open secret in Pakistani music scene, the cream of the crop’s rise has been nothing short of monumental. But something was still missing.
Ahsan recalls a conversation with Savannah Musical Festival Executive and Artistic Director Rob Gibson, who has, in the past, hosted the likes of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Zakir Hussain.
“When Rob came here, we had a long conversation and he asked, ‘what’s your formula?’ So I said it’s a million-dollar question which I can’t answer,” he chuckles. “He said, ‘Ahsan, this music is original if you keep it original’. I think for two years; we had drifted away from his message and we are only now coming back to it.”
He believes every band goes through a down period but that during their down period, they thought about how they wanted to take this Sounds of Kolachi story forward. “Now it’s all coming full circle to its roots. The same thing what Rob Gibson said.”
With SoK reshaping their trajectory, one can expect an even more experimental, inventive, innovative and fresh music coming out of the ensemble.
As of now, they have come up with a new song called ‘Sultan’ for Paanch – The Mixtape, a collaborative project by Chand Tara Orchestra. “It’s a kalaam by Sachal Sarmast and it’s going to be the first progressive rock song in Sindhi,” the music director reveals. “This age is all about mysticism and quantum physics. We read Sachal Sarmast and found a kalaam which talks about quantum physics and entanglement and we were boggled.”
After Sultan, SoK has a few more gems qawwali called Allah Mian as well as a Manqabat (a hymn in praise of Hazrat Ali) with an orchestral composition and in Persian language.
“I really want to compose something in Bengali language in the next few months too,” says the composer. “We have completely disowned Bengali language and culture even though we used to be part of a single country. Sure, we are separate countries now but there’s still a connection. It’s a huge part of our South Asian culture and we can’t deny that. We still connect to Rabindernath Tagore’s work. It’s not like if we sing Raag Yaman, it’s different and when a Hindu sings it, it’s different. It’s all the same. We have owned South Asian music and enveloped it under Sounds of Kolachi.”
Within the next year, Sounds of Kolachi also plans to focus more on ‘audiovisual productions’. “We are known for out of the box stuff. Expect some more out of the box in terms of musicality, instrumentation and collaboration.”
While this talented group of musicians has come a long way in the last five years, with members coming and going and the lineup changing all the time (Ahsan admits it’s not easy running a huge ensemble in Pakistan), there seems to be a power shift in SoK.
Sounds of Kolachi
© Usman Dadi
“The thing is that it was all my idea so no matter if all of us come together, if I’m not there to take action, nothing would progress. I realized it last year and now we are in the middle of working toward transferring this power,” says the founder. “I will always be the ideologue, but I don’t have to be the center of the ensemble.”
He has since been grooming others to take charge. Gul Muhammad, who has been with him since the beginning, knows “exactly how he thinks.” Meanwhile, “Quaid has been with me for more than 5 years. Then we have the bassist Saif Abbas Rizwan. Waqas (sitar) was an essential part too but he has recently left the group.”
Asked why he left; Ahsan says they both realized the sitar player was destined for bigger things. “He is someone for the long haul. He’s a star and he had to start his solo career but he couldn’t give time to either. We suggested he take a break. See, you can’t separate Waqas from Sounds of Kolachi.”
Even in a music scene where momentum seems to pick up in bursts and fade out as fast, Sounds of Kolachi has established itself as a solid frontrunner in the current wave of musicians.
Individually, the members were dispersed, but collectively, the SoK banner has elevated all of them. It introduced so much new talent that has gone on to do big things.
Quaid shares his side, saying he was juggling between acting and singing, working as an extra on shows, and auditioning in universities and youth festivals. In one such festival, he met Ahsan, who was part of the jury, and he took him under his wing. “I had no plans of taking my singing career forward because I didn’t know anything about studio recording, music, arrangement or production. Then when we spoke, he said he saw a spark in me and started guiding me,” says the young vocalist.
After Ahsan took him to a TV show, a show he was producing with Shahi Hasan in 2014, Quaid mingled with greats such as Aamir Zaki, Ali Azmat, Strings and others and started getting familiar with the process. “As I started absorbing the vibes and understanding how this whole thing works, I thought maybe if I work hard at it, I can do it.”
Quaid’s is just one of the stories of how the brand ‘Sounds of Kolachi’ has not only given fresh artists a spotlight, but also how it nurtured and groomed them, and helped recognize their talent. Ahsan agrees.
“You know the one thing Sounds of Kolachi has done for all the musicians, including myself, is that it has changed our perspective towards music and sound. Sounds of Kolachi helped recognize Ahsan Bari as a composer. Same goes for Gul Muhammad. This was possibly the first band in the history of Pakistan where you see a sitar and a sarangi player being presented in a rock-star mode. Natasha Baig has come out as a big star, thanks to Sounds of Kolachi. Nimra Rafiq has come out as a performer. Sameer Ahmed returned to music. Faraz Anwar returned. Sounds of Kolachi has done a lot for all of us. It’s a big idea.”
Listen to their album here: