KARACHI: It’s not a regular sight that a new season of Coke Studio gets launched with fanfare. Well, this time round it did on Friday evening at a hotel here when the 10th edition of the popular musical platform was launched.

To be fair to the organisers, it was a decent event in terms of its duration and speeches made, which were relatively short and to the point.

Faisal Kapadia (of pop band Strings that produces the show) said it was after four years that he and Bilal Maqsood (the other member of Strings) had stepped on a stage. He was excited for the 10th season, also because soon Pakistan was going to celebrate its 70th Independence Day, and the band had been together for 28 years.

Bilal Maqsood told the audience (which comprised a large number of media, the advertising teams behind the programme and the musicians and members of the crew of the show) about what it took to make a single edition of the show. According to him, it had four layers. The process started in December and ended in September. In December the structure and theme for the season were decided, along with the songs. Sometimes such ideas were discussed by virtue of a single line or riff played on the guitar. The second layer was to do with experimentation with the songs and the musicians went into the jam room. There they “construct, deconstruct and dissect” the songs.

In the third layer the “sound” of Coke Studio was looked upon, because the programme had its own “genre”, which should not be lost. In the last phase of preparation, the lead singers were brought in. “When a singer comes in, he brings in his own dynamics to the song.”

At that point Kapadia interjected and talked about one more thing. He said in this day and age of technology, the singers and musicians who took part in Coke Studio performed live [in a single take]. If a drummer mistimed a drum roll or the singer fluffed a line, the entire song would be rerecorded. He called it “mind-blowing”.

He showered profuse praise on the musicians and invited them and the production team on stage so that they could get a round of applause, which they did.

Earlier, Abbas Arslan said Coke Studio was a milestone in the history of Pakistani music. He said Season 9, when it concluded, had 300 million views and its top two songs were soon to hit the 100 million mark.

Rizwanullah Khan, general manager of Coca Cola Pakistan and Afghanistan, said who would have thought that 10 years ago Pakistan could come up with a musical programme of global significance. There were 20 countries which were following Coke Studio, and none of them had been as successful as Pakistan. He added that the show was much beyond popular music because it projected the ‘soft image’ of the country all over the world. After his speech, the first episode of the new season went live digitally.

In the first episode, four tracks were shown. The first one was ‘Allahu Akbar’ performed by Shafqat Amanat Ali and Ahmed Jahanzeb. It was brilliantly done and both singers appeared to be at the top of their game. The second number was ‘Chhai kali ghata’ by Amanat Ali and Hina Nasrullah Khan. It had its praiseworthy moments as well, especially at the end when the female vocalist hit the high notes. The penultimate song was ‘Muntazir’ by Danyal Zafar (Ali Zafar’s younger brother) and Momina Mustehsan. It was a decent effort. The last act of the episode was Ali Sethi’s version of the classic Mehdi Hasan-sung ghazal ‘Ranjish hi sahi’.

Hira Tareen conducted the launch.

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2017