Coke Studio Season 8 Review - When Strings got the blend just right & Nabeel Shaukat Ali stood out with Bewajah!

It's been just two blog-posts since the supposed 'reincarnation' and lethargy has already begun to set in! While I still need to figure out how to get that discipline into my system, just had enough time this Sunday to write my next post which was lurking in my head for over a year!

The perennial hunger for good music does bring out the uncharacteristic stalker in me as I spend loads of time browsing various online channels to search for my 'aha' moment. The one forum that I keenly look forward to and has not disappointed me so far is the coke studio series from across the border. Being the biggest platform to showcase their music, unlike in India where Bollywood is still the king, I have discovered some amazing tracks come out from there! My hypothesis for this is that there is much more independence for musicians to be creative and imaginative while they experiment with their arrangements and not being influenced by producers, directors, script or demands to force fit an item number!

While each year has produced some remarkable tracks, I was really impressed with the last season (8th), with each episode having something to boast about! Given that the 8th season came out almost a year back, this blog, as you might have guessed was long due! And alarm bells started ringing when I recently read about the line-up of Season-9 (which btw looks equally exciting and esp. the experimentation with multiple producers within the same season!) and I thought this is perhaps the last logical opportunity to write about a bunch of amazing compositions perhaps unknown to many and hopefully this blogpost and the couple to follow will help reduce this information asymmetry!

I would like to begin with my find of 8th season – Nabeel Shaukat Ali. Bewajah for me is the song of this season and it's only fair that I dedicate this blogpost only for this beautiful composition!

Co-incidentally Nabeel was the winner of an Indian reality show Sur-Kshetra, which I generally avoided for all the melodrama and cold war between the judges. Incredibly talented is the least I could say to describe him. Nabeel is super soulful on one hand and technically immaculate on the other and that indeed is a killer combination very few possess! I only hope he goes on to give us more of these gems.

Coming to this composition, while the melody and the arrangement of the coke studio version was more like love-at-first-sight for me, what hit me a little later was the simple, yet deep lyrics! One can relate to these lines quite easily and the soothing melody that accompanies it takes you out of the world for a while. The lyrics are written by a contemporary poet Babar Shakeel Hashmi.

The whole composition is a combination of many distinct, independently creative layers woven together by Nabeel’s soulful melody perfectly. Begins with a typical pop arrangement – acoustic guitar, standard drums and with a pronounced bass-line which at places stands out with its own parallel melody. And then magic begins to unfold with Nabeel’s melody first and then the strings section filling the air beautifully as the chorus attains a crescendo. The first stanza brings in the traditional instruments. The flute and tabla are very distinct and goes well with the softness of the melody at 1.53. The strings then kick in again at 2.15 as the pitch picks up. Watch out for the flute interludes in between one of the stanzas. Use of Flute by Sajid Ali and Strings section led by Javed Iqbal has been a common theme across compositions in this edition. And it has been wonderfully arranged by Strings, not overdoing it, just the right amount to bring in the blend of classical and folk music beautifully.

My top stanza of this composition was:

Unse milne ki wajah koi nahin

Dhoondhta kyun hai wajah bewajah

So enjoy this classic and do share your observations and thoughts! I am sure you’ll have this on loop for a couple of weeks if this is the first time you are hearing this. In the interest of this post’s length will discuss my other top picks in the upcoming post. So until then stay tuned, keep listening and sharing.

- Prabhu :-)
musicdilseblog@gmail.com