Strand Three Profiles and Interviews - Mr Ashfaq Kazi (Minto)

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Mr Ashfaq Kazi (Minto)

Age: 43

Interview date: 22 _ May _ 06

Interviewed by: Jamil Iqbal

Mr. Kazi was a dancer crew member of Joi Bangla Crew. Joi Bangla Sounds & Crew exploded into the music scene and had coverage in all the national newspapers and had TV coverage. Mr. Kazi created his own dance moves. The style and the tempo of the dance moves were fused with the beats of Bengali music.

My name is Ashfaq Kazi, known in the community as Minto. I work as an IT consultant and I am 43 years of age.

Q: How did you come into music?

I think most young people are exposed to music. I certainly remember, when I first came into this country in 1973, I was impressed by Elvis Presley. The first album I had was Elvis Presley’s greatest hits. When my family came over we had a collection of 45 records, they were published by the emerging record industry in Bangladesh at the time. Lot of the songs were patriotic songs and we had that in our collection and that was my first exposure to Bengali music as such.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the Joi Bangla group, how it was formed and why it was formed?

At that particular phase of my life I was quite heavily involved with local young people and I was actually a member of the Bangladesh Youth Movement (BYM) based in Cannon Street Road in the Wapping area. At the time I was working in Montefiore Centre for an organisation called the Federation of Bangladeshi Youth Organisations (FBYO). I was in the management committee including Ansar Ahmed Ullah so through the FBYO, being affiliate organisations for Bangladeshi youth organisation throughout the UK, we did quite a lot of work with the youth organisations, say in Bradford, London and other areas. It was very natural for me to sort of get acquainted with personalities working on the League of Joi Bangla (Youth). The League of Joi Bangla (Youth) at the time was not a formal organisation with its own base. They were mainly a collection of personalities very much mobile, so they have worked from say Montefiore Centre or they will run a play scheme based at the BYM or wherever they will get some space or wherever they will get some facilities. So it was all very complimentary work to what I have been doing in a voluntary capacity but also tied over to what I did in paid capacity for the FBYO.

Q: What was your part in the band?

Asfaq Kazi (Minto) of Joi Bangla Crew, 2006

My first involvement with the League of Joi Bangla (Youth) was that they had organised a scheme, they got some funding from the authority to take a group of young children, bring them on school holiday periods on various activities and play scheme activities, taking them out to the funfair, go to the seaside, museums and I got involved at that stage. That’s purely a direct community involvement with the League of Joi Bangla (Youth). On the other side, I know, we would have had discussions on other areas and avenues that we could explore, we could diversify into. One of the areas that we felt lot of attention and focus needed was really on how we could best promote the Bengali culture and when we speak the Bengali culture, it is obviously the music and the dance form etc because we felt that the young Bangladeshis who were growing up in this community were not truly exposed to it. Looking at the first generation of immigrants who came over, the only thing they needed from the parents were to go to school and leave school as soon as possible and contribute towards the family establishment. All first generation had the huge barrier to overcome to get themselves established. Amongst my peers at that time lot of my friends had very minimum education and they were more or less pressurised to work in the rag trade and the restaurant trade. By the time I finished my education, the generation that was up and coming who may have been born in this country, had actually no exposure to the Bengali culture and its rich heritage. They didn’t know that our culture and heritage was diverse and stretching back to thousands of years. Our music was accomplished in terms of the poetry. These were the basis of our culture that we wanted to bring over to the young people. The way we decided to promote it was through the medium of English music and dance because for lot of young people that was what they were getting into, sort of listening to the Top of the Pop because they wanted to be more westernised. They were quite happy with that side but we thought if we can do some activities, we can introduce our own culture and do it in a way that the young people will be interested to listen. We thought the good idea would be to present it as a fusion and that time I think Haroon who was a musical genius behind Joi Bangla (Sounds), was experimenting with music. We sort of played around him and came up with this style or fusion of mixing Western music style with Asian music style. When I say Asian it is not only the Bangladeshi music, it was all the popular Hindi music, Punjabi music and classical music as well.

Q: Did anyone sing in that group or was it just mixing music?

I think the initial kick off for the League of Joi Bangla, in terms of music side was purely producing the music. Initially I suppose the music was bootlegged on to cassettes and they may have been distributed by the young stars among themselves. To take it to the next stage, we decided to try and promote it and get some western media involvement, which it needed to be visually appealing as well as musically, it must hit more senses than just the hearing sense, so the idea came about of setting up a dance group, whereby we would sort of play the music and perform some dance routines. This way we managed to get some interest of some of the people. I guess there was a London publication regarding it, I can’t remember the publication, I think it was City Limits or Time Out, one of those two (It was City Limits which is no longer published). The first event, if I am correct, was in the Mulberry School for Girls. They had these events with lots of different acts happening-- this was in 1986-87. We were able to secure a slot to go and do a performance. We basically got members within the organisations together and volunteered. We quickly covered and got together some routine. We practiced like mad and performed and City Limits were there, reporting on the event. The reporters were quite impressed by what we did and this resulted in featuring us on the front page and quite an extensive article on us. This was the first exposure and we got a lot of request from other organisations to do more events. We promoted that side as much as we could.

Q: Were you involved with the band on a TV programme?

That was the first focus, so now we had the Joi Bangla Sounds-- Haroon, Parul, Mark and Hassan. We had different members wanted to contribute in a way they can so we had the Joi Bangla Sounds (JBS) and obviously if they wanted to play in a party, they could engage with the JBS. I think we never did a dance event as a separate entity. My recollection is always been the dance group and the JBS doing an integrating performance. The actual live band that came after, that was, most probably, Ansar’s idea, that we have got a dance group, we have got a sound, mixing all these music but there were individuals who had the skills and the talents who could produce live music. Now we were entering an area from where I was moving away from the performance side of things.

Q: What type of the music did you listen to growing up in London?

I think, Elvis was my introduction to Western music per se. From Elvis, I suppose, I got more exposed to Top of the Pops. I guess Top of the Pops would have been the standard music programme that was available. That played lot of pop music and current popular music. In my late teens, I would say from eighteen onwards, my own personal inclination was towards music of the Black origin, like jazz, blues and hip hop. In my schooling years there was a fair bit of reggae. When I came to this country it was purely rock & roll, and it was from 1973 and lasted for about 4-5 years. I wasn’t, how can I say, an integrated member of the society, up to date with what the music was. My exposure of music was based on what people listened around them. As I started to get more integrated and started making friends, my musical experience broadened and I started to see other styles of music. Then only I was able to make a choice.

Q: Did you ever sing?

No I never sang. I have an atrocious singing voice, I have never sung.

Q: Did you ever playe any instruments?

No, I never played an instrument as well. But during the university period I was involved with the Asian Society and we did perform. I was involved in performing, but I was performing as a dancer.

Q: What sort of dance did you perform?

At the time of my university, the Asian dance style which was popular was the Bhangra. With the Asian society, I spent quite a bit of time following a group called Alaap. I performed in various university events more as a dancer. There weren’t that many Bangladeshis when I was in Queen Mary, local university. There was quite a large number of Punjabis, so I was gravitated towards their cultural influence at the time.

Q: Was it break dancing?

Break dance was very popular in the mid 80s, but there were some members with different musical interest. I believe with the style, tempo and the beat, the Bengali music has, I think, it will be very hard to generate a fusion of Bengali music and say hip-hop because that’s quite a fast music whereas the classical mix was with James Brown which is bit more soulful and slightly slower tempo, it tends to fuse much more musically with the Bengali style. I don’t know if Haroon experimented but break dance fusion with Bengali music probably would have had an unpleasant result.

Q: Before any performance did you use to practice?

Yes, we used to practice every evening after work. I believe we had a space at Mulberry School for Girls. We had a good relation with the school after our performance so we were allowed to practice in the school after the evening in one of their halls. We also practiced at Tower Hamlets Association for Racial Equality in Cambridge Heath Road.
We weren’t a professional group of dancers, we all had some amateur experience but we were a crowd who were more outgoing. A lot of us used to go to parties, clubs and dance so we were not shy of getting up and dancing.

Q: Were there any choreographers?

Yes we had choreography. It was in the sense that, we used to sit down and listen to the music being created and everyone giving their views and consensus of what sounds good and what sounds bad. Once we were happy and we liked the combination, then we decided how we could move to the music. Every evening we used to get together after work and rehearsed. Once the rehearsal aspect had ended, the core group, with Ansar, Haroon, Farook, myself and few others at the time get together at Haroon’s place and listen to music, create music, come up with dance moves. The whole group was created because we had the slot at Mulberry School for Girls. Right from day one we didn’t create a dance group, we didn’t have a dance move and we didn’t have a dance routine ready for public consumption. We had an event and we had to perform and we had to come up with it. We had a time pressure to come up with the routine, come up with music and get everyone trained. From that moment on we had a commitment that “this organisation wants us to do this event and we got the exact amount of time, let’s go back and come up with some music”.

Q: Were you being paid for it?

There was some payment but it was mostly on expenses. It wasn’t that the individuals got paid. The money we were getting was spent on buying some record or some instruments or costumes or travel cost. Some times we had to hire some equipment. It wasn’t a commercial enterprise, these are voluntary organisations so they can cover expenses but couldn’t pay professional fees.

Q: What do you think of the young generation?

I think at the time when we exploded into the scene, we truly did because from one article we had coverage in all the national newspapers, we had TV coverage. So from one means or another, we had a mark and we were known. I believe we had quite a positive impact, kids were happy with what we were doing. They liked the music we were producing, they liked the dance routines. So in some ways the effort that we put into this had permeated out to our target audience. Young people at that time were exposed to the Bengali music and I suppose that sales of Bengali music had picked up significantly.

Q: Can you tell us about any of your memorable events?

That’s a difficult one to say. I can remember the event in Pall Mall, I forgot who was the organiser, may be the National Film Theatre (It was ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts). It was a week long event and they were basically showcasing Asian music. We had bands like Alaap, there were all sort of different groups and all of them performed. And we performed two times so we were the only group that performed twice… we were asked to perform for the second time, so that event is one of the memorable event to me. Our performance was picked as the highlight of the week long event. That was a very good feeling and this was not just at the local community audience but we were exposed to quite a broader audience. It is easy to do something in front of a local community because they have the understanding. They understand the song that is sang but if you go out to an audience who has not heard you before and no affinity to Bengali music and yet see that they appreciated it after the performance, it is a very nice feeling.

Q: What is your comment on mixing the Eastern music with Western music?

Different people have different view on this. Someone who has been brought up with a very classical view point, I am not an expert on Bengali music but I am sure that there are different styles. So from a purist point of view, it behoves to keep those styles alike and obviously to make people aware of the different styles. With Western music I can listen and say well that’s garage, that’s R&B or that’s pop or rock because there are certain style that makes that song belong to that particular genre. For us we didn’t have that level of complexity, for us this is Bengali music, this is a Bengali song that is sang in a language that we barely understand. We didn’t have the complexity to specify the style of the music. Our aim was trying to educate young people into appreciation of the Bengali music per se. Our aim was purely to give them some exposure, whether it is a small snippet of a popular song, we think that’s an achievement. I suppose there are audiences that will appreciate pure and unadulterated genre but who knows, maybe there is a sizeable generation who appreciates a fusion. They like it because that gives them best of both worlds. I think it’s the view point at the end of the day. Music can never be static, people are creating new styles, old styles are being modified and resurfacing as something else, it’s a very organic growing thing and it comes from people’s heart and as long as you have an audience who appreciates it then that music will grow, if you create something new and nobody likes it, that’s going to die. You can’t put a framework around music and say that this is the boundary of the particular music and you need the freedom to grow. It will grow as demand of the business change.

Q: Nowadays you don’t see new generation Bangladeshi groups specifically focused on dance?

Dancing was a means to an end. Again with dancing, we had the music and we produced the music that fused Western music and Asian music and it sounded good to our ears. We knew we had an appeal to the both sides of the population. We just needed to get it out there. We just needed to get it promoted. People listen to music on stereos or cars, that is one aspect but to get a wide audience we needed to have something visually. If you create an event and some people just playing music it doesn’t have that visual stimulus. If you have a group of young people dancing, the audience has a visual stimulation as well as the audio stimulation. That’s the reason we had the dances. Nowadays with the modern groups, they probably don’t want a visual stimulation to detract from the music, so they want to perform and they want to sing and they want the audience to be focused on that. They are obviously promoting themselves. We weren’t in the game to promote ourselves as individuals. Our aim was to promote the music, we didn’t really mind dances or any other things as long as the music got out and got played on TV and radio or being written about or young people hear it and see it--that was enough for us.

Q: Are you proud of being a part of the Joi Bangla group?

Yes, I think it was an achievement. We did our best at that time to try and promote our own culture. The fact has succeeded in the way it has, we should be proud of our achievement. We have to remember that we were only a youth organisation, trying to do things in our own way. None of us were professionals, and we were not guided by professionals. We didn’t have external experts coming in and telling us the way of doing the best. Idealistically we decided it ourselves and we went and did it.

Q: Are you training up your kids, do you show them your own moves?

I don’t think there is any need for me to train my boys, just as there wasn’t a need on my parents to train me. As they grow up and absorb various facets of society, they will make up their own mind which direction they want to go in. I will not stop them if they want to go into music.

Q: What do you think of the traditional music?

I don’t have a wide experience of Bengali music as such. If you listen to popular music, it is not much different from the Western music because lot of the popular music are using Western instruments like synthesizers, guitars and drums so the music is pretty much Westernised any way. I don’t particularly enjoy that particular type of music because that is not a fusion. I think we have taken the worse aspects of Western music and put that into our own culture. For me, I like traditional old music, especially I like flute music as Bangladesh is a land of river, and you will find a lot of the regions in Bangladesh, they have the music and they play it on the flute. That I think appeals to me more simply because it is not only different but it is unique to our tradition. Nowadays you have too much of a dilution by Western influences.