The Sachal Studios Orchestra has pulled off the impossible: topping charts around the globe as a world-class jazz ensemble, while braving threats and intimidation to breathe new life into the dying cultural traditions of Pakistan.
Hand-picked from a lost generation of classical musicians who used to play in Lahore’s once-flourishing ‘Lollywood’ film industry, the Sachal Studios Orchestra has made its name with innovative and irresistible interpretations of well-loved jazz standards. Little wonder they’ve been called Pakistan’s Buena Vista Social Club, and Lahore’s answer to the Blues Brothers. Last year they sold out the Queen Elizabeth Hall and reached number one in the US and UK world music charts with their version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Earlier this month, they joined the legendary Wynton Marsallis on stage for a nine-song set at the Marcaic Jazz Festival, in front of an audience of over 10,000 people. Now they’re cementing their success with their second release, ‘Jazz and All That’, expanding their repertoire to include some unique takes on unexpected twentieth century classics. You’ll never hear Eleanor Rigby or Everybody Hurts the same way again.
Izzat Majeed is the heart and brains behind the project. A London-based Pakistani businessman, Majeed has been on a personal mission to rediscover and assemble Lahore’s most talented yet neglected Lollywood musicians, finding them in the most humble of places: a cellist was running a roadside tea stall, a violinist was selling vegetables from his bicycle. “They were getting on in age, they’d stopped teaching their children how to play, and they were surviving however they could,” Majeed remembers. “They’d just given up, because they didn’t see any future in music.” Some classical instruments, like the sarangi and the sarod, had all but died out in Pakistan. Majeed was determined to revive them. After despairing of the “dismal, coffin-like cubicles” that passed for studios in Lahore he gave the musicians a place to record in 2005. Working with consultants from London’s Abbey Road Studios, he built Sachal Studios – their £2m state of the art, custom-made facilities – using his own money earned working as a fund manager and adviser to a Saudi oil minister. Once word got around that Majeed had constructed the best music studio in Pakistan, musicians started knocking on the door. If you build it, they will come!
The son of a film producer, Majeed, 63, grew up in Lahore during Lollywood’s heyday, when the city made hundreds of musicals a year, their score performed by virtuoso musicians. “Our house was always full of music,” he says. “My father would call in all the greats and have an evening of them playing. It got inside me, unconsciously.”
Majeed Sr also introduced the young Izzat to jazz, playing him Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and taking him to see Dizzie Gillespie and Dave Brubeck live (when he was six and eight, respectively). His dual passions for jazz and classical music from the subcontinent were nurtured simultaneously. Both depend on improvisation and free movement, and for Majeed, they are two sides of the same coin. So when he was selecting and arranging songs for his classical musicians to record, choosing jazz standards was a no-brainer.
Lollywood was crushed in the 1980s during the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s longest-serving head of state, “the father of the Taliban,” according to Majeed. An Islamic hardliner who took a dim view of cinema and music, General Zia used martial law to further his conservative beliefs, shutting most of the cinemas and harassing the rest out of existence. Lahore’s once thriving cultural life began to be silenced: musicians once heralded as heroes became afraid of practicing in case they offended their conservative neighbours. Three decades on, the mind set cultivated by General Zia still dominates in Pakistan. Lollywood produces fewer films a year, and without the classical soundtrack the industry was once famed for. And while the Sachal Studio Orchestra held the top spot in the world music charts in the UK and the US for several months last year, the ensemble are barely known at home. The studios latest album‘Jazz and All That’ follows the success of their first album ‘Interpretations of Jazz Standards and Bossa Nova’, released last year, which included their famous take on Bruebeck’s Take Five. The Single held the top spot on the iTunes world music chart in the US and UK from July- September last year, and the video became an unexpected YouTube sensation.
“Brubeck’s Take Five was played in every small kiosk in Lahore in the 1960s, it was always there, and it’s always lived with me,” says Majeed, “so I thought I’d make it. It was a labour of love. Then one fine day, my label rang me up to say it was number one in America on iTunes. The musicians were in heaven. They took jazz very seriously after that!” From the soaring strings and swirling flutes of the opening track, Stevie Wonder’s You’ve Got It Bad, it’s clear ‘Jazz and All That’ marks a new direction for Sachal Studios.
Of course, there are the jazz standards, like their exotic yet familiar rendition of Henry Mancini’s The Pink Panther Theme with its rousing tabla introduction, and their take on Brubeck’s complex, energetic Blue Rondo à La Turk – “one of the great compositions of jazz, and very difficult”. But then there’s the ‘All That’ part of the album: surprising interpretations of The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, REM’s Everybody Hurts and even Morning Has Broken.
“Eleanor Rigby has a very forceful free time – you should see the sarod playing,” Majeed says. “You can call it a jazz interpretation of Eleanor Rigby.” However you want to classify it, the Sachal Studios Orchestra makes this track their own, completely – dark, lamenting and ominous.
Asking Majeed to pick his favourite track is a bit like asking him to choose between his children, but he eventually settles on Edu Lobo’s Bossa Nova classic, Ponteio, where bright flutes float above driving rhythms. “You can dance on that one,” he smiles. For Sachal Studios, this is just the beginning. The ensemble is looking forward to further collaboration with Wynton Marsalis at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln centre over two nights in November. As Majeed says, “there’s plenty more to do.”
Regardless of the inspirational story behind the Sachal Studios project, and the challenges he’s had to overcome to make it a reality, for Majeed, it really is all about the music. “I’m not a crusader,” he says, “I just want to listen to music that really shakes my soul and feels like great fun. That’s the reason I do this. And hopefully, other people will like it too.” The world touring orchestra has taken Pakistan’s music all over the world. The first jazz album topped the world’s music charts and the late, great, Dave Brubeck’s ‘‘Take Five’’ went viral and brought Pakistan to the attention of music lovers globally. It is still growing on You Tube with over 600,000 hits.
The Sachal Jazz Ensemble was invited to perform at the prestigious Marciac Jazz Festival in France with the collaboration of the master of jazz, Wynton Marsalis and his wonderful musicians. The third of August will be a date remembered by all jazz fans as the concert was broadcast on the internet stream globally.
