Jaubi: a transcendent fusion of raga and jazz
Band leader Ali Riaz Baqar talks about the joyful spirit of collaboration that fuels the group’s groundbreaking new album
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“Raga is emotion. It’s music that can transform you from feeling happiness to feeling despair or vice versa,” says Ali Riaz Baqar. “And it does it all without words. I’ve never experienced anything quite as powerful before.”
For the Pakistani-Australian guitarist and composer, 35, mastering the ancient Indian classical musical form of the raga has become a consuming quest. Having initially fallen in love with the intricate acoustic guitar arrangements of the jazz pioneer Joe Pass and independently releasing several of his own solo guitar improvisations, he formed the fusion quartet Jaubi in 2013
Since then, he has been merging the spiritual tradition of raga with improvisation to remarkable effect. Over three albums — The Deconstructed Ego (2016), Nafs at Peace (2021) and In Search of a Better Tomorrow (2023), a collaboration with Polish jazz group EABS — Jaubi (meaning “whatever, whoever” in Urdu) have established a unique sound at the meeting point between Indian classical music and jazz, drawing upon the legacies of greats including John Coltrane, Don Cherry and Yusef Lateef, who all took inspiration from South Asian music.
“I never anticipated our music would take off in the way it has,” Baqar says, during a phone interview from his Melbourne home. “We’ve sold out UK tours, played a Boiler Room session and found a home in the brown diaspora.”
Growing up in a religious household and listening to Sufi qawwals from an early age, Baqar began his musical career in the western jazz tradition, creating solo acoustic guitar work that blended alternate tunings, dextrous finger picking and improvisation. While on a holiday to Lahore in 2014, though, he booked a studio session and was introduced to a whole new perspective.
“One of the studio engineers said I would sound good with a sarangi accompaniment, but I thought he was referring to a person,” he says. “He gave me the number for Zohaib Hassan Khan, who joined me with his sarangi, which turned out to be a three-stringed instrument, and we hit it off. That was how Jaubi began.”
Sharing a love of raga, Baqar and Khan began to improvise, drawing on a variety of styles including north Indian classical music, jazz and hip-hop. After enlisting tabla player Kashif Ali Dhani and percussionist Qammar Vicky Abbas, the quartet recorded 10 compositions that would form their debut album. Traversing everything from the emotive solo guitar of Make Them Proud to the rapid-fire tabla playing of Dha-Vi and a sarangi homage to hip-hop production pioneer J Dilla titled Time: The Donut of the Heart, The Deconstructed Ego is a boundary-pushing body of work that catapulted Jaubi to listeners far beyond Pakistan.
Taken by their Dilla cover and an ensuing tabla-heavy version of Nas’s New York State of Mind, titled Lahore State of Mind, London-based multi-reedist and producer Ed Cawthorne, also known as Tenderlonious, decided he needed to fly out to Pakistan to work with the group.
“My father was a Ghurka and I’ve always wanted to go to India to record, since I grew up being inspired by the ragas he would play me and by the Indian classical-referencing music Yusef Lateef made too,” Cawthorne says. “But once I heard the Nas cover Jaubi did, I knew I had to get to Pakistan to meet them and collaborate.”
Landing in Lahore in April 2019, Cawthorne met the group and embarked upon a week-long immersion in their musical dynamic. “We had no idea if the trip would be a disaster or if we would gel, but that’s what made it so exciting,” Cawthorne says. “We had a few teething problems, like the sound engineers watching YouTube on full volume while we were trying to record and the call to prayer meaning we had to constantly stop, but it ended up being a purifying experience to just surrender.”
Along with Polish keyboard player Marek Pędziwiatr, Cawthorne and Jaubi ended up recording two albums in the week they spent together: Ragas From Lahore (2020) under the Tenderlonious alias and the improvisational fusion of Nafs at Peace (2021). Featuring a tender image of Baqar’s mother on the cover, crying while delivering her morning prayers, Nafs at Peace met with critical acclaim, becoming one of the Guardian’s global albums of the year, thanks to its energetic interplay of free-jazz explosiveness and emotive raga melodies.
Following a UK tour in 2022, which featured a date at the Union Chapel in Islington, north London — “brown and white people of different religions playing together in a Christian church, which is exactly the Jaubi ethos,” Baqar says — the group’s globe-spanning members from Pakistan, Australia, the UK and Poland made the most of being in the same place. Decamping to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, they set about recording Jaubi’s latest and most ambitious album to date, A Sound Heart.
“The 2019 Lahore sessions were raw and rough and we often didn’t have the quality of equipment we needed,” Baqar says. “A Sound Heart is much more composed, expanding our lineup to eight musicians and showcasing a new sound that is sweeping, as well as soft, romantic and slow.”
With the title referencing a verse in the Qur’an that instructs people to come to God with a sound heart, or “qalb” in Arabic, Baqar describes the record’s 10 compositions as a journey of pure intention — “not being flashy, but rather connecting with a higher power to speak through us”.
The result is virtuosic. Opening with the big band swing of Lahori Blues, which features a searing soprano sax solo from Cawthorne, A Sound Heart encompasses everything from intricately arranged homages to jazz greats — Misunderstood (Blues for Mingus) — to fast-paced jazz funk fusions (Wings of Submission), yearning sarangi balladry (Forgive Me) and wistful, piano-led introspection (Reflections of God).
This time featuring Baqar’s father on the cover and dedicated to his parents, the album is a clear step forward for the group, highlighting the warmth and immediacy of their signature raga-jazz sound.
“We’ll be on our biggest tour yet to China, the UK and the US over the next year,” Baqar says. “We can’t wait to reach the world and have them experience the emotional power of this music too.”
A Sound Heart is released by Riaz Records
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