Shahram Azhar with Aqeel Bhatti

Thursday, Oct. 15, 7:30 p.m.
Weis Center Atrium

Associate Professor of Economics at Bucknell University Shahram Azhar will be joined by friend and fellow musician Aqeel Bhatti, a tabla player. The duo will fuse Urdu and Punjabi poetry and North Indian music with Western traditions.

Azhar is a classically trained musician, composer and singer in the North Indian classical tradition, starting his training at 6 under Ustad Mahfouz Khokhar. A child prodigy, Azhar became the youngest solo artist to sing on Pakistan television. His work combines revolutionary poetry with the emotional vocabulary of the Raaga and Thaat system — a tradition developed over 5,000 years — which tells stories of human life and existence through music.

In 2008, Azhar founded the band Laal, using music and poetry as instruments of resistance. His debut album, Umeed-e-Sahar, composed during the Musharraf dictatorship, became Pakistan's number one selling album and produced anthems of democratic resistance still sung across India and Pakistan. His most recent album, Maa Boli Da Qarz, has been received as an intellectually rich contribution to Punjabi music. He has sung in over 15 languages, with his most recent English song a poem by Robert Frost, composed in an Indian-Western fusion scale.

At the Weis Center, Azhar will take the audience on a spiritual journey from birth to death through the Poorya Dhanashri Raaga. Each set of notes will, without words, communicate the universal human emotions of birth, happiness, reassurance, yearning, anxiety, confusion, restoration and deliverance. He will follow with a ghazal by the great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib with the evening being devoted to a single Raaga system.

Aqueel Bhatti studied with renowned tabla player Khalfa Irshad Ali, son and disciple of Mian Nabi Baksh of the punjab gharana. Bhatti has performed for radio and national television of Pakistan, TV Asia, Sahara TV and Voice of America as well as in the U.S., the Caribbean and Canada with artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. He is on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania where he's taught tabla in the Department of South Asian Studies since 2005. In 2011, Bhatti joined Swarthmore College's dance department where he accompanies the North Indian dance class.

Ticket Information

All Adults: $20
Youth Under 18 and Bucknell Students: Free.
No discounts may be applied. Seating is general admission.