KARACHI: At the Bahria auditorium on Sunday evening, the message of education for all resonated among all and sundry, at a charity concert where world renowned ensemble Sachal performed to raise funds for Developments in Literacy (DIL), which aims to educate and empower underprivileged children.

These children are just another face in the crowd struggling to survive, in one slum or the other, giving up the dream to study just to bring home enough to feed the family.

Millions of such voices have been drowned by the apathy of everyday survival but DIL has taken up the task of empowering them and believes that as no child should be denied access to quality education, they have set up schools where thousands of children are currently enrolled.

Be it dreams of becoming a cricketer, learn the skills to becoming an electrician or just attain education to better provide for one’s family, the refrain of all these children remains the same — to become respected members of society and succeed despite their disadvantaged upbringing. DIL has over a hundred schools where around 25,000 underprivileged students are educated for this very purpose.

At the fundraiser, Sachal ensemble was flown in, whose origins are similar.

When the era of Pakistani cinema died, with it orchestras that used to work in them became obsolete. Musical performers became scattered and it became very difficult for them to eke out a living through music. That is where the inspiration behind the Sachal Jazz Ensemble came from.

The Sachal project is the brainchild of Izzat Majeed who decided to bring back the music, the instruments and the musicians that had faded into oblivion.

Picking up the genre of jazz and fusing it with classical musical instruments, Sachal orchestra has performed over the world and has 13 concerts due in the US just next month.

The concert began with the Punjabi song ‘Mahi Kithey Reh Gaya’.

The next performance was ‘Some enchanted evening’ a melodious ballad that kept evolving and the tabla and the sarangi were the stars of the performance.

Another powerful performance of the night was of the folk song ‘Teri Ishq Nachaya’.

The audience was also treated to the Pink Panther theme song that, with the classical twist, could very well have originated from a local studio thus indicating the mastery of the ensemble that made the tune their own. The same can be said of the rendition of “Windmills of your mind” by Michel Legrand.

Izzat Majeed’s original composition ‘Shalamar’ was also part of the line-up.

Published in Dawn, October 16th, 2017