KARACHI: It’s not often that one gets to see the prominent qawwal brothers Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad taking part in an event that focuses on experimental music. This means that performing qawwalis in a western instrumentational set-up. In a way, they have done that for Coke Studio quite successfully.

The show Trance of the Dervish that took place at the Arts Council’s open-air theatre on Friday evening promised a bit more, because it claimed to fuse the eastern genre that the above-mentioned duo are masters of with rock ‘n roll and EDM — featuring Ahsan Bari and Mekyail Ali, respectively.

Before inviting Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad on stage, the band led by Bari played a nice little track that enabled music lovers, which came in decent numbers, to get used to what they were about to hear.

The qawwals then arrived and began with ‘Nami danam ke aakhir chun dam-i-deedar mi raqsam’. To be honest, it didn’t get the crowd going because the vocalists sang quite a few verses from the kalaam making the piece last for a longish period and the band kept playing the same tempo. They could have trimmed down the performance a bit.

Trance of the Dervish enthrals music lovers at Arts Council

It was the famous ‘Qol’ that got the audience involved. Some of them even belted out certain lines from the composition, too. As always, the brothers performed it well as did Bari with his guitar riffs, but the whole bit sounded a trifle under-rehearsed highlighting the importance of a tabla for such an act.

Then things began to pick up with the very popular ‘Tere ishq nachaya’. Both the vocalists and the band seemed in sync. Farid Ayaz is in the habit of narrating short back stories of the kalaam or translating the Persian verses into Urdu for the audience, especially the younger lot, to contextualise the lyrics. Friday night was no different.

The instrumental that followed was nicely done. It was power-packed and clean. At the same time, it emphasised the convergence of two distinct auditory moods — western and eastern — nicely cohabiting a singular creative space. And the concert carried on for quite some time with qawwali, rock and electronic sounds coming together to add melody and rhythm to a nippy Karachi evening.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2026