The first thing you see and hear in a YouTube clip of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” as recorded by the Sachal Jazz Ensemble in Lahore, Pakistan, is Ballu Khan breaking the song’s familiar five-beat meter into furiously quick subdivisions on tabla, the hand drums endemic to Hindustani classical music. Cut to Indrajit Roy-Chowdhury, seated cross-legged atop a small wooden table, stating and then elegantly bending the melody; next, bearded men, clad in spotless white kurtas, sitting straight-backed on chairs and playing violins and cellos.
Musically, none of this should surprise us. The 5/4 rhythm of Brubeck’s 1959 classic, which no longer sounds radical to jazz fans, comes quite naturally to musicians trained in the classical traditions of Pakistan, as are the Sachal’s players. Odd numbered meters are favored in their music. The sitar’s fluid lines and bent tones, and the tabla’s nearly conversational rhythmic patterns, aren’t exotic to Western ears anymore; by now, they make sense in a jazz context.
What’s remarkable about the clip is that it was made at all; yet more unexpected is where it’s led. When the Sachal Ensemble joins the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) at Manhattan’s Rose Theater on November 22 and 23, the concerts will deepen a recent collaboration and extend an unlikely journey. (To that point, they’ll be filmed by Oscar-winning Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy for a closing scene in her documentary-in-progress on the Sachal group.)
In 2011, that YouTube video went viral, attracting nearly a half-million hits. Soon after, the Sachal Ensemble’s “Take Five,” from its recording “Interpretations of Jazz Standards and Bossa Nova,” shot to the top of the iTunes chart in the U.S. and U.K. All of this took Izzat Majeed, who assembled the group, by surprise. The 62-year-old businessman, who was born in Lahore and now splits his time between there and London, has been on a mission. “I want to restore a sense of culture and the joy of music that I remember from my childhood,” he told me in a recent phone conversation, after a rehearsal with the Lincoln Center group. “We essentially lost it, due to the barbaric interpretation of religion and governance that started when a dictator [Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq] began to restrict the arts in the late ’70s. And we’ve had little enlightenment since.”
Majeed wistfully recalled Pakistan’s “Lollywood” scene, which, much like India’s “Bollywood,” made films that were largely musicals. “The stories didn’t always make sense,” he said, “but the music was always good, and played by musicians with best training.” Lahore once churned out some 150 films a year, but now, Majeed said, it produces just 10. “Musicians lost their livelihood. Culture lost its patronage. Nobody will stop you from playing music, but nobody listens.”
Almost 20 years ago, Majeed began tracking down musicians, often finding them in the humblest of circumstances: 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 recalled. “They’d just given up, because they didn’t see any future in music.”
In 2002 he began recording albums — 30 to date, of traditional music as well as jazz and other styles. In 2005, using his own funds and with technical assistance from London’s Abbey Road Studios, he built the state-of-the-art Sachal Studios in Lahore, named after the Sufi poet Sachal Sarmast.
Turning to jazz was Majeed’s idea, and it came quite naturally. He recalled hearing Brubeck’s “Take Five” booming from kiosks and shops in Lahore when he was a boy. “It was a big hit in Lahore, too,” he said. He heard Brubeck play that song at the auditorium just down the street from his childhood home — where he also heard Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie— via “Jazz Ambassadors” tours sponsored by the United States Information Services. “I was mesmerized, hooked,” he said, “and later on, I realized that the structures of jazz and of our classical music are very much the same.” He felt that jazz would offer a good context for the kinds of embellishment and improvisation required for Pakistani music.
But he didn’t expect jazz to provide a marketing strategy.
Jason Olaine, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s director of programming and touring, saw the Sachal Ensemble’s “Take Five” clip in 2011. “I thought it would be cool to have them on our season,” he said, “but we had already closed the calendar for 2012.” The following spring, he got an email from Majeed expressing interest in collaborating with Wynton Marsalis, along the lines of the JLCO’s recent work with Ghanaian drummer Yacub Addy and Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucía. “I pitched it to Wynton,” Olaine said, “and he was into it.”
The Sachal Jazz Ensemble first performed with a septet drawn from Marsalis’s orchestra in August at France’s Jazz in Marciac Festival. In a YouTube clip from that concert, during Duke Ellington’s “Limbo Jazz,” LCJO drummer Ali Jackson, on trap set, falls into lockstep on the gently swinging calypso rhythm with a percussion section of tabla, along with dholak and naal (both two-headed drums). Baqar Abbas, who plays bamboo flute, appears well equipped for the task of responding to the improvised calls of Marsalis’s trumpet.
“In Marciac, we found out that these cats were the real deal,” LCJO bassist Carlos Henriquez wrote in an email. “After the first note played by Baqar on flute, we immediately knew that this combination would be special.”
At the Rose Theater, the ante for the project will be upped by the presence of Marsalis’s full jazz orchestra. Henriquez, who is among those arranging the pieces, some of which are played in Pakistani idioms, was still working out the fine points on “Rhythmesque,” which was composed by the Sachal Ensemble’s conductor, Nijat Ali, in 11/8 time.
In a brief clip available online to preview Chino’s forthcoming film, after one musician laments the plight of trained musicians in Pakistan, Nijat Ali says, “Without music, man would roam the world with a heart of stone.” Now he and his and bandmates are traveling the globe, playing at festivals and concert halls to heart-warming receptions.
