Sufi Soulmate

 In 1997, a Pakistani rock band released their first single and a music video that accompanied.

It combined table and electric guitar, and had a raspy voice with a brilliant vocal range and powerful delivery. The singer, Ali Azmat. Salman Ahmad was the lead guitarist who also wrote many of the lyrics. He had parted ways with Vital Signs to start his own band. He then convinced Brian O'Connell to relocate from upstate New York to Karachi to play bass guitar for the albums. The signature theme of this song is the use of Tabla as the only percussion, played brilliantly by Ustad Aashiq Ali.

The song, Sayonee, means soul-mate. The sufi themed video as well as the use of tabla became a sensation in south east asia, leading to a sub-genre of music called Sufi-rock.

Ali Azmat though, stole the show. While it is true that the lead singer is often the most recognizable part of any band, few vocalists have the sheer force. Ali Azmat took this song, with short meter and simple lyrics (well, simple Urdu, I still needed to look these up to translate),put it into bursts of energy. Each stanza is an anti-climax, where the first line rises in the pitch, then followed by a strong long-drawn vocal for a word. That word then becomes the next level, in some sense, and Ali follows it going even higher in scales. The last line of each stanza is an anticlimax, going back to the original scale, giving the listener, a sense of fatalistic melancholy that the song so wonderfully conveys.

The music video was directed by Asim Reza, and was shot entirely in the Multan. The not-so-obvious plot of the music video rotates around a boy who struggles to find his soul mate and goes through many troubles in life. The video was never entirely clear, but at the beginning, I wasn't sure if a child is being kidnapped, or taken away from something by his father. Furthermore, as the music video proceeds the boy is shown all grown up but still struggling to find his soulmate and thus, is shown running in order to try to save himself from the troubles he has been into. The Urdu lyrics needed us to look up their English translations.  I remember translating this song as "Chain ek pal nahi, saath koi girl nahi.. Sayonee"

The music video shows the band performing the song wearing traditional sufi clothing and in between the music video short clips of whirling dervish.

Watch Sayonee on youtube or listen to it Live, in Central Park, on soundcloud