Strand Three Profiles and Interviews - Mr. Sam Zaman

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Mr. Sam Zaman

Interview date: 28 _ Mar _ 06

Interviewed by: Jamil Iqbal

Mr. Zaman is the lead singer of ‘State of Bengal’, set up in 1987 after he returned to London from a visit to the village of Noakhali in Bangladesh where he met and interacted with traditional musicians and dancers.‘State of Bengal’ mixes Bengali and Western street style dance to create a style that reflected the diverse facets and synergy between the two cultures in the UK. He has also worked intensely with Asian youth groups in London’s East End, many of whose members went onto become some of the ‘core ‘ DJs of the Asian Underground Scene. Sam fulfilled a long time dream in 1998 - a collaboration album with the late Ananda Shankar entitled ‘Walking On’. At present ‘State of Bengal’ is working on a dance music concept.

Sam Zaman, 2006

Sam Zaman interviewed 28 March 2006

Hello. My name is Saifullah ‘Sam’ Zaman
I am a music producer, musician, performer and a DJ

Q: How would you describe your music?

I think depending on which album I am working on, it is very different. The first album, ‘Visual Audio’, was more of an experiment, sculpturing sounds and figuring out, how I wanted them to sound like in relation to a feeling in a club setting. The music is written for a club environment. But there was also specialist pieces written for people’s wedding and stuffs like that. It’s also more of a psychological mindset. The philosophy behind ‘Visual Audio’ was based on having a vision as a picture frame, without actually having the physical picture frame and writing music to that picture frame. So they all are based on psychosis of some kind. Rama communication is basically, any entity leaving this planet, returning back to see, what is happening to the planet, and hopefully to express themselves as an outer being.
‘Flight 1C 408’ was a journey from London to Calcutta. ‘Chittagong Chill’ was about the nightmares I encountered in Chittagong, when the student riots were happening like in 1987. ‘Elephant Ride’ was a journey in the Dhaka zoo with my grandfather on the back of an elephant. So these things are very fixed in my mind, as to experiences that really kept with me, stayed with me, whether it is dark or light, or philosophical or non- philosophical. For me there is no boundary between any of those. So when I write, I write without biasness in a sense because I am not writing for any fixed mode. I am not making a genre of music. When I write music, I am not saying I am writing hip-hop or house. I don’t think about that. That is one thing unique to Visual Audio, which came out in 1999 in the UK, and worldwide around 2000 and then in America in 2001, people are still buying it, people are still discovering it and people are still finding it.

The next album was ‘Walking on’, which is a collaboration album with Ananda Shankar from Calcutta, who is the nephew of Ravi Shankar. It was mainly written for life sensibility. It was going to be the first time Ananda Shankar was going to play in the UK, in his entire history. We wanted to translate a modern and yet something that would have the sensibility of Ananda Shankar’s writing also. We toured before we recorded the album, which was unique, in my experience, anyway. That was 1998. That was toured with nine musicians and about ten venues across the UK. Largest venue we played had 40 thousand people.
That was just rock and roll style of writing a live project, and I got very ill actually recording that because we were working from 11 in the morning till 4 the next morning, non-stop for about two weeks. I ended up in hospital for couple of days because my body was exhausted. Unfortunately, Ananda died. We had two years of solid touring around the world already lined up months in advance, may be a month before he past away. It was a phenomenal album.

The last album ‘Tana Tani’ was recorded with Paban Das Baul, the Bengali Baul singer who lives in Paris. ‘Tana Tani’ was recorded entirely in his living room and also in a studio in Paris of a friend of mine. Again the idea behind it was to tour the album globally and actually to promote Bengali experimental Baul music in the twenty-first century. I spent three and half years writing that album. It’s unique to the kind of an album that it is. There is no other Baul album that sounds like it. People may say ‘Real Sugar’ was similar to it, but it was not, it’s a different sensibility. ‘Real Sugar’ contains songs that existed already. ‘Tana Tani’ was about producing Baul songs that did not exist and finding melodies that didn’t exist. Baul has a system of 256 or 286 or more melody structures, which classical field of music is also adopted, taken, changed and shape.

So for us to go and investigate melody and melody structure in Baul song writing, well you can call it Baul or you can call it no-Baul, no matter, point is you are writing new songs, that’s the point. So its nothing else, ‘Tana Tani’ tried to do that.

Now I am writing a new album called ‘SKIP- IJ’, the music is not straight forward, people have to move differently and dance to them. There are also couple of Bengali songs in the album, again experimental level stuff.

I guess future projects are, I am writing a film score for this documentary which has already taken shape. It is called the Bengali Scrolls. I’ll go in December to Kolkata and start writing. I will be working with local folk musicians in Calcutta and probably classical musicians, so it will be different again. I haven’t written anything for it yet.

I got to write for this other project. It’s for a contemporary music network tour of the UK in July. I have got to write an hour and half for that show, which features Taufiq Quraishi, who is Zakir Hussain’s brother and Vasundhara Das who is a classical singer, she was the lead actress in ‘Monsoon Wedding’. I have started writing already and let’s see how it turns out.

Q: How did State of Bengal start?

State of Bengal started when I went to Noakhali, to the village, and talking to my cousins about culture, bordering of people, history of people, movement of people and they were saying, before partition (1947) people were moving around. It seemed people were different before partition. After partition and independence, things have become different and segmented. Arts are not valued so much, primarily because those propagators of Islam said, “we don’t want art in our system, because it leads to anything against Islam”. My idea is always about music. Life is always about uniting things, making things come together, that are what humanity is technically about. Humanity is all about people coming together, families coming together, communities coming together, family structures are together; everything is together. Hence we are talking in a village and I said “It’s nice to have the state of Bengal again”. So that’s how the formulisation started, you are sitting in a Dhan Khat (a wooden bed where you keep paddy rice) in a village and talking about what it means to get people together. It was in 1987.

That turned into looking at the difficulties that was happening in Brick Lane area with the different gangs and thinking how to bring the gangs together, so we did some peace raves with Ansar Ahmed Ullah and few other people. The idea was to bring the gangs together, so that they could at least air their voice and opinion, so everybody was aware of what everyone else was thinking. Less confusion means less reason for violence. We did that for a few years.
I had my youngest brother, Deedar (went on to become vocalist of Asian Dub Foundation), who was 7 and Mustaq who was 15 at that time, we were writing lyrics about what young people feel, what they would like to talk about or they would like to communicate, the element of racism, how it’s affecting them on a personal level and their life growing up in East London. So that went on for a few years till about the early 90s. I had already started university, doing a teaching degree and I kind of felt the last year I needed to stop the ‘State of Bengal’ altogether so that I can concentrate on doing my dissertation and finishing my course. As soon I finished I came back into producing music again and started writing different things altogether.

Q: What do you think of the Bangladeshi community and music in East London? I have heard you were one of the pioneers in fusion music, east mixing west.

Normally, I don’t know what to say about that. Normally, everyone says it to me. Yes, we were doing it before anyone else, before the whole Bhangra scene had erupted. Bengali music that was being mixed with other styles of music was pretty much before anyone else has done it in this country. So Bengalis were the pioneers in mixing Asian music before Bhangra. With the exception of maybe Sheila Chandra, who was going under the name of Monsoon and she had a track in the top five. Even those kinds of music were tailored to western philosophy and ideology. The concept of westernism and how to fit the Indian identity in the western construct as opposed to saying no to whatever the construct is, “this is what we are going to do, irrespective of what the construct is”. So that really took shape with us, because we were mixing Amir Uddin and James Brown, reggae and dub things, Bengali classical and Indian classical. So, for us, I think, back then was very different, you could go to different places and most of the places were word of mouth, we really did not advertise anything and normally 500 to 600 people turn up to some space. As that progressed it went to thousands, we used to do gigs and stuffs in Liverpool where in each room there were like 5000 people and there was 20 rooms. So we did get to another space where I don’t think it exist today. Lot of things that has happened, we don’t tend to see too much of them now. Nowadays, its about, you either follow the American ideology of music and try to combine little bit of Bhangra with little bit of American R&B or American hip hop and not produce anything as anywhere near, the quality of what the Americans produced. We are still trying to justify, because it’s our Asian heritage. Instead of actually saying “Let us develop something unique from us, that will challenge everything that is just out there”, and that’s where I think the whole mentality falls short. Instead of challenging, we rather try to fit in and everyone is trying to do that. Sometimes it means that you don’t stand up.

In terms of Bengali community and music, I find it lacking and I find it always lacking. Bengali music has always been strong in the classical field in this country. Even those are very unmoving, Rabindranath Tagore and Rabindra Sangeet, it does not address anything to the young people at all, never has done. Simply because it’s the mindset of the elders who control the so-called arts of Rabindranath, and what they deem would be acceptable or not acceptable.

I have been working with some young people in East London. Suzana Ansar is a classical singer and has got a different way of working with classical and experimental music and music that young people would feel. It’s a fine balance, not an easy balance.

People have to look at the best ways of promoting music within a Bengali community sense, how to encourage people to do that is more important, how to support that system, how to support that mechanism. You got lots of clubs in East London, where they will fly over a Baul singer from the middle of nowhere or someone they like and people will come there to see them. It is in the hidden joints that nobody really knows unless you know. In the olden days, I remember we use to have festivals and events that were arranged by Bangladesh Youth Movement from Cannon Street Road. It doesn’t happen now. I don’t hear anything about it. Some where along the line, we have taken a step backwards, in terms of modern day Bengali cultured or Bengali influenced music. That is something that needs to be addressed and re-addressed because unless that happens you can forget about Bengali culture and music, because it won’t exist in this country. The young people are not into it and the reason why they are not into it is because they don’t see any relationship. They don’t see enough of it; they need to see a lot more for them to be totally passionate about it. Sometimes the reason why they are into hip-hop is because they see too much of it, too much hip-hop out there. The American gangster’s culture and ideology is in every single element of culture, especially in the UK. UK lives the American culture, but on a very schizophrenic level. I believe, the young people really search what it is for them, truly search what is inside them whether they are Bengali or not Bengali; whether they produce Bengali music or not produce Bengali music because they do it out of passion as there are no Bengali producers at all. Bengali kids are more influenced by Bhangra. They are influenced Bhangra, R&B and hip hop; some of them are going to jungle etc. There is definitely a shift away from what Joi Bangla (Sounds now known as Joi) did years ago, where we did have the following, where young people did feel empowered to see other Bengalis out there doing that and gave them a bit of self-confidence. There need to be another young group of people like the Joi Bangla group. Young group of kids, who really have the intention of saying “we do value our culture”; we do value what musical history we have enveloped and developed over the last 5-6 thousands of years. It is not entirely Bhangra, R&B or so on.
Society is so diversified that you have far more choice now, you have to work that much harder if you want to get it through or otherwise no one is going to know; if you are not making noise, nobody can hear you.

Q: What do you think of festivals and melas?

It is good, the fact that it gets the community together, it gets community out into one place, but there are not many events for kids and families. You got melas and festivals which means, there is a possibility, if the families are open enough to go to them, at least you have a congregation and you have a mindset of certain group of likeminded people. They are very good for that reason alone.

Q: Have you participated in melas?

I have participated in melas. I did Bradford Mela last year. I did a workshop and I did DJ with Sonia, a Pakistani friend of mine, who is an Urdu vocalist. I have done few different things. I still do them but not just in this country, most of my work is in overseas. America, India, China, and Europe wherever it takes me, I just go. In February we did in Brazil.


Q: Can you share with us a memorable experience of a gig or an event done abroad or in the UK, one you are proud of?

I think the proudest one for me personally and because I have the name ‘State of Bengal’ also and to make sure that we ended up playing in the State of Bengal, we played in Dhaka, Chittagong and Kolkata in 2001. For us that was a State of Bengal playing in the state of Bengal. That made me felt very proud. My grandfather was very proud but he was very unhappy for he had to see me after 13 years. I saw him for an hour after 13 years then I had to leave the next day or following day. Certain things are very difficult in musical stuff, when it comes to family and friends. You go to Bangladesh, you go to the villages, you want to see your cousins and aunties and uncles and the chicken and the fish and the snakes. In villages you got lots of snakes. So those kinds of things are something else not necessarily to do with music but they can be a part of music. Unfortunately, when you are touring very heavily you don’t always get what you want. So you are slave to the music more than you are to life itself.
Playing in Dhaka, I played in Osmani Centre, two nights running, both shows sold out and playing with musicians from Bangladesh as well. Having string orchestras from Dhaka was amazing. I was really amazed.

Miles and some other rock bands were there. It was so un-Bengali! It’s cool; they love their rock and stuffs like that. I have a lot of respect for them for doing what they love but it would be nice to hear something that is unique. The Bengali rock bands can make some other kinds of music. I will wait to hear that. I am sure people will be making that kind of stuff.

Q: What do you have to say to the young generation, those who want to go into music?

I think one have to have passion for music, one have to have real love for music. You can’t do it because you want to have a big car, or a gold chain, or impress the women. You can’t use those reasons for wanting to do music and unfortunately most of the younger generation musicians, Bengali or non-Bengali, that’s the main reason why they want to do it. There are very few exceptions to that rule. I have a friend, his name is Zak, he is only fifteen, he does it because he loves guitar and he loves melodies, good enough reason for me. He is not looking at the gold chain and big car philosophy. Money, money, money--music isn’t that. Most musicians don’t make money.

Q: What do you think of your music, where is it leading to?

I have no idea, absolutely no idea, probably to destruction really. I don’t know because I never looked at it and say it needs to be like this, needs to be like that. I never looked at like that because I never tried to aim for a certain market here. My latest project is not set for any market.

Q. Can you tell us about your schedule for gigs?

We got so many gigs coming up in this year, it’s unbelievable. I am going to Toronto in June, in July, UK and on August I am going to Brazil. It’s all happening this year. I haven’t released an album last year. I am about to release one now. In the past year, I have not released anything. I have three albums so far. The next is the fourth one and I am writing the fifth one and the sixth one I am planning. I write it all on my own then I get musicians to play certain parts but I write those parts. I don’t play all instruments, I play some of them.