LAHORE: The fourth edition of the annual Lahore Music Meet kicked off at Alhamra Art Centre on Thursday afternoon with the sun shining bright on a rather cold day.

The Alhamra lawns have bedecked with multicoloured buntings and a delightfully decorated sitting area for the music festival that featured a mix of interactive masterclasses with musicians, singers and live performances on its first day. There is also a dedicated food and activity area serving Thai, Chinese and local delicacies.

One of the lawns provided a stage for outdoor performances throughout the day with the inimitable Fazal Jutt, Sunny Khan Durrani and Baloch rapper Sami Amiri among the few performers on the first day who managed to gather a significant crowd that seemed to thoroughly enjoy the showcase.

In the art gallery, the Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) hosted an interactive music session, called Mosiqi Mulaqat, to encourage inter-generational exchange of music where senior citizens had brought in playlists of their favourite songs from over the decades and shared them – and the memories associated with them – with the younger generation. Music archivist Fayaz Ahmed Ashar, who was among the people sharing their music, told Dawn: “I have a collection of songs right from 1902, including by one of the first recording artists, Gauhar Jaan, to music from the 1980s; I have transferred the songs from records onto cassettes that I could listen to while travelling. I have spent millions on this hobby and collected records from India, UAE, the US and many other counties wherever I could find them.”

One of the sessions was a masterclass on western percussions, called Shaken Not Stirred, with Aziz Kazi accompanied by Waqas Imdad where Kazi talked about how new sounds could be created using multiple instruments. He then gave a demonstration producing sound through darbuka and ghungroo. Both Kazi and Imdad played a melodious, foot-tapping fusion of sitar, ghungroo and darbuka to a huge applause from the little audience they had managed to attract.

Up next in the same hall were the now-popular Abid Brohi and Lyari Underground boys who had an almost full house listening and cheering loudly to their animated rap that they concluded with the super hit, ‘The Sibbi song’.

Multitalented well-known photographer Mobeen Ansari in a session, called Depth of Field, talked about various images in his books Dastaan and the White in the Flag, and his memories of those images.

He also talked about his experience of capturing musicians through his lens, the art he claimed he had learnt while shooting the legendary Abida Parveen in action. He then shared shots of various musicians, including Alamgir, Ali Azmat, Aamir Zaki and Hadiqa Kiyani, and told the audience why he shot the images the way he did.

One of the event organisers, Natasha Noorani, told Dawn that the event this time lacks star power but their focus has indeed been concentrated on masterclasses “as opposed to fluff panel discussions which no one has any interest in”.

About the growth of the event since the first edition four years ago, Natasha admitted they were growing really slowly due to lack of resources and the fact that they mostly relied on fresh graduates as volunteers for each task. The festival would continue today (Sunday).

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2018