After topping the world music charts and selling out the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Alchemy Festival last year, the Sachal Studios Orchestra is back with ‘Jazz and All That’ – and album of their unique interpretations of jazz and beyond.

Performed by virtuosos who cut their teeth in Pakistan’s once-flourishing Lollywood film industry, ‘Jazz and All That’ brings together the most accomplished classical musicians of the subcontinent to play jazz classics – with a few surprises thrown in for good measure. As the Evening Standard said after their Queen Elizabeth Hall performance, it “ought to be wrong but sounds so right”.

‘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.

The Sachal Jazz project is the brainchild of London-based Pakistani businessman Izzat Majeed. He tracked down the best musicians of Lollywood’s heyday, once revered but now hanging up their instruments in a more conservative Pakistan, and got them into the studio once again.

Majeed has overcome threats, dismal recording facilities and disheartened musicians, using jazz to breathe new life into Pakistan’s classical music scene. He’s taken the musicians out of obscurity to be heard across the globe, prompting comparisons with the Buena Vista Social Club.

'Jazz and All That’ showcases the best of East meets West. It includes jazz standards that can’t fail to delight – try and listen to the Sachal Studios Orchestra’s rendition of The Pink Panther Theme without smiling – but there are some unexpected pleasures there too, including tracks by Stevie Wonder (You’ve Got it Bad Girl), The Beatles (Eleanor Rigby) and REM (Everybody Hurts). The video of their interpretation of Everybody Hurts is already clocking up views on YouTube.

The release is part of the most exciting year in Sachal Studios’ history. November will see The Sachal Studios Ensemble performing with Wynton Marsalis at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln centre, in a ground-breaking collaboration.

By reimagining some of the best-loved songs of the West, the Sachal Jazz project is keeping Pakistan’s traditional music, musicians and instruments alive. This is Majeed’s labour of love, but he takes its success in his stride. “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 Sachal Studios Orchestra

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. 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 world 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.

Dedicated to the memory of Dave Brubeck, ‘Jazz and All That’ comes with a bonus disk featuring the Sachal Studios Orchestra’s famous interpretation of Take Five, which Brubeck himself described as “the most interesting and different recording of Take Five that I’ve ever heard.” As well as topping the charts, the Take Five video - featuring musicians playing the hypnotic grove cross-legged in shalwar kameez – became a 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 a forthcoming collaboration with the legendary 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.”

Jenny Kleeman
Jenny Kleeman has reported for ‘Unreported World’ and ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4, BBC One’s ‘The One Show’ and BBC Two’s ‘Explore’. She writes features for The Guardian, The Times and The Sunday Times.

Live Dates

Wynton Marsalis & the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra and Sachal Jazz Ensemble

Sachal Jazz Ensemble

Live In Concert

Wednesday 27 November / 7.30pm
Friday 29 November / 7.30pm
Kings Place, London

Tickets: £34.50 / £27.50 / £21.50 / £16.50

Box Office: 020 7520 1490 • www.kingsplace.co.uk • info@kingsplace.co.uk

Venue: Kings Place Music Base 90 York Way, N1 9AG LONDON, Kings Cross



Visit the Sachal Music website to purchase 'Jazz And All That', the new album from Sachal Jazz Ensemble, or 'Sachal Jazz' the debut album

From :    SAMA  November 19, 2013