Pakistan Arts Council, Los Angeles and the Aga Khan Museum present singer-songwriter, composer, and author Ali Sethi, who is currently #1 on international pop charts with his global hit sensation “Pasoori.”
Also performing is Discostan, a diasporic discotheque which imagines past, present and future soundscapes from Beirut to Bangkok via Bombay.
Set Times:
6:30pm - Discostan
8:00pm - Ali Sethi
For Location, Parking & FAQ, click here.
“Sethi, a classically trained musician as well as a singer, composer and fiction author, has grown to be one of Pakistan’s most popular pop stars, though having lived in the US for the past five years he has said he sees himself more as a “diasporic voice”.
The song has been heralded for transcending boundaries, particularly between India and Pakistan, continuing a long tradition of culture uniting the two countries where politics always failed. In India, Pakistani soaps are among the most popular television shows, while people in Pakistan avidly consume Bollywood films and music.”
“Sethi was born in Lahore in 1984; his parents are the prominent journalists and publishers Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin. His childhood home was “full of jail-going writers and activists,” he told me, over Zoom, from his apartment in New York, and, by middle school, he was taking calls for his parents from Amnesty International, giving rote updates on political dissidents, such as “Habeas corpus has just been filed!” His mother, when not marching for equal rights, played a lot of Qawwali, a genre of Sufi devotional music. Sethi began singing Qawwali and ghazals—lyrical poems—in his clear, young voice to impress his parents’ friends. “Song and protest were intertwined for me,” he said. He started to realize that, in a society with so many fault lines—along caste, class, and ideology—folk music made everyone feel welcome and accommodated. Traditional music felt like a safe place to express himself and to explore the dawning awareness of his own queerness.”
“Something seems to happen with Sethi’s music: boundaries fall away—between past and present, earthly and transcendent, between art and religion and politics. “We are many and we are one,” he says. A singer classically trained in Pakistani traditional music, whose voice can shift from plaintive to raw to warmly intimate, Sethi (pronounced say-tee) has become a star in (and, increasingly, beyond) Pakistan. Since 2012, when he appeared on the soundtrack for the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist (directed by Mira Nair ’79), he has toured internationally and been a regular presence on Coke Studio, Pakistan’s popular live-music television show. This past April he made his debut at Carnegie Hall as one of three soloists in Where We Lost Our Shadows, a multimedia orchestral work co-created by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun, Ph.D. ’06, about human migration and the flight of refugees. And for the past several months, he has collaborated with Grammy-winning musician and producer Noah Georgeson on an album, to be released by summer 2020, that combines classical South Asian music with his own songwriting.”
Over more than a decade, diasporic club collective and record label DISCOSTAN has been conjuring past, present and future soundscapes from South and West Asia all the way to the Maghreb.
From presenting a vast archive of golden-age music to the most forward-thinking creative producers from our regions, performance collaborations with avante-garde artists outside of the white cube, to galvanizing political engagement, Discostan is an ever-evolving space of possibility, imagination and
liberation for its community.
Each time we materialize, we weave a sonic tapestry that threads together
anything from golden-era Bollywood/Lollywood numbers and Lebanese cinema scores, to psychedelic funk from Turkey, Iran, Burma and Thailand, the searing frequencies of Syrian dabke, Iraqi choubi, Afghan qataghani and Egyptian electrochaabi, to contemporary experiments in music and archival field and folk recordings in their rawest forms.
Founded by Arshia Haq and co-helmed by Jeremy Loudenback, Discostan has performed in Europe, Asia and the US, and has opened for international legends such as Bappi Lahiri and Omar Souleyman. Their work has been featured on Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Economist, Red Bull Music Academy, KCRW, The Quietus, and beyond.
Presented with support from Pakistan Arts Council, Los Angeles, the Aga Khan Museum, and Ahmad Tea.
