The "Ultimate Gaana Party"

8/11/2002

Actually like most things it started randomly. I was talking to a friend over instant messenger at the same time I thought about the idea of calling all the Indian and Pakistani musician friends I know from across the US together for a weekend jam session. The idea had *just* occured to me, but of course it had to sound fully-baked, so I said, "Are you going to be around in August? Because I'm hosting an Ultimate Gaana* Party at my place." The concept was a bit like someone saying they're gonna invite a bunch of buddies over for barbeque and football at their Ultimate Football Party... way too much of an exaggeration to take anything about it seriously. But people loved the idea, so we settled on a weekend, and we began talking about what we'd play.

It proved nearly impossible to pick a setlist in advance because we had never all played together, and we had no idea how it would sound. So instead we planned to give ourselves just one day before the show, after everyone arrived, to organize and practice enough material to perform for three hours. The mix was necessarily going to be eclectic: our musical backgrounds varied from south Asian rock to classical choral music to top 40 pop to classical indian. Owing much to the talent of the musicians, when the weekend arrived and everyone was at my place, the song list practically created itself. We spent half the time jamming, and the other half looking up lyrics on the web and hanging out.

We played our mini-concert the next evening to a house full of my enthusiastic friends. We gave them a mix of songs from Junoon to Lenny Kravitz, from Lauryn Hill to Incubus, from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to the Beatles. It wasn't perfect (we traded lots of email critique in the days after the show), but people enjoyed themselves, the musicians enjoyed themselves, and I'm still getting glowing email and comments from friends who were there. If you are one of those people, thanks for coming! It was great seeing you! We're planning another Ultimate Gaana Party early next year. Now that we've played together and everyone's met everyone else, we hope to make the next time even more enjoyable. See you then.

-Adil

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(*) "gaana" is Hindi for "music"