Aicha, Aicha in my Life. Part 2: Atlanta
This a continuation of a memoir on how the song ‘Aicha’ played different roles in my life. Part 1 covers the story in Bangalore but now we come to Atlanta, GA.
Taal Tadka
In 2009, I moved from Bangalore, India to Atlanta, Georgia to study at Georgia Tech. I have mentioned in past posts about my love for a cappella music after I heard Penn Masala. It was in the three months of idle time coupled with more internet privileges before I went to college, I discovered Penn Masala. It was so fascinating hear songs I grew up with performed purely with voices including the drums which was performed by a beatboxer or as we aca-snobs would say, Vocal Percussionists. Penn Masala is the oldest South Asian A Cappella group in the world when it came to life in 1996. While their musical tastes have changed over the years, I personally liked their 2000s albums like ‘On Detours’ and ‘Pehchaan’. The album Pehchaan listed their version of Aicha and it was a masterclass into how to perform a cappella.
Some of my Penn Masala favorites from the time:
The guitar intro from the Outlandish version was replaced with three voices that sang ‘Doo Tu Tu’ in the notes of the intro to build each chord and crescendo at the last chord of the progression. Then the beat kicks in with a deeper voice mimicking the bass. The lead singer begins the first verse of the Outlandish lyrics and more voices fill the track with a very Indian sounding “Ta na Ta na Ta na Ta na na na na na na” as a new layer to this song which really makes it Penn Masala’s own. The additional guitar licks have been converted into alaaps and there is so much life into this song came from Algeria to Denmark to Philadelphia. If this wasn’t enough, they wrote a brand new second verse of their own to incorporate into the song.
I speak about Penn Masala and their song Aicha because I also wanted to sing a cappella in college and was lucky that Georgia Tech had a South Asian group called Taal Tadka who were actively looking for new members. So a month into college, my then relatively new friend Safeer and I followed college maps to the edge of campus to the Graduate Living Center for our audition. We honestly didn’t know how it would work apart from being given a list of songs by the group where we had to chose one to perform for that as well as another song of our choice. Safeer is going to be a prominent character in the rest of this story so I’ll keep sharing more information about his as we go on. Safeer was from Bangladesh and while Bollywood music did make it to their televisions back home, singing Hindi music was not something he did too much. That being said, the South Indian in me was always too shy to speak or sing in Hindi because of the fear of mispronunciation. This gave us common ground to practice singing “Kal Ho Na Ho” without too much pressure.
We go to the auditions where Safeer and I are introduced to another candidate, Spandan, who will be a dear friend for life for all the music and laughter that came through in these many years. But then we all wait outside the room for each of us to be called. I thought we would just sing two songs and join the group. But it was a little more involved than that. We do a vocal warmup that is very awkward to do if you had never done before as well as you keep singing as high or low as possible on the piano to determine your range. I’ll be the first person to admit I’m not a great singer but I can hold a note and often end up getting a gig because no one else wanted to do that part. So do the warm ups, sing Kal Ho Na Ho and Hey Jude where I definitely went off on the Na’s. But a few weeks later, Spandan, Safeer and I were in and about to go for our first rehearsal.
Singing by yourself and singing with ten others is a whole new ball game. I had some experience singing in a choir but making sounds in tune that sits with everything else was new to me. The team members initiated us with a song that helps us get into the groove of a cappella better. The song of course, was Penn Masala’s Aicha.
I knew that I could hit lower notes well so I was assigned the role of bass. Moinak, who used to sing that part mentored me into the role. A role, that he had to do before because there was no one else to do it but now, with me, the world was ready to hear his magnificent voice as lead vocalist. I still remember how he would tell me to be more expressive in saying “Dummm” by raising his eyebrows and hitting air on beat almost to transform from human to instrument without compromising on the emotion of the song.
Moinak and I would go on to sing and perform with each other even after college. It has been almost 14 years since we sang the bass line of Aicha but just a couple of days back, we were going back and forth on his latest cover video of Shauq from the film Qala. Our musical sensibilities are similar and our journey has a long path ahead.
Dual Degree
As my life in Taal Tadka went on, it was always with Safeer. We went to rehearsals together, practiced our parts together and just jammed at any time of the day for the four years we were at Georgia Tech. A few random moments are here below.
But when we finished our freshman year of college, we went back home to India and Bangladesh. It did get boring after a couple of weeks and I was very fresh into using Garageband and making my own tracks. One fine day while communicating on Google Chat, Safeer and I decided to make a cover of Aicha. Just the two of us. The production is cringeworthy but I’ll share it as I redeem myself later. But Aicha was probably the first time I was a (very amateur) music producer. So our first recorded song was Aicha.
A couple years later, Safeer and I would form Dual Degree, an experimental A Cappella recording duo. We have one release on streaming services, a doo-wop version of Lil Wayne’s hit song Lollipop. It has me rapping as a pseudo country singer while Safeer layers a vocal horn section that gives the song a 50’s vibe. All this was recorded on a USB microphone in a dorm room before it was tastefully mixed by our long time collaborator, Prem Midha who was gracious enough to allow me to sit with him as he patiently explained each step of the mixing process. It was a fun song and we still enjoy listening to it.
From the time we made that Aicha track, we both had come a long way. Safeer had honed his craft with the guitar, singing and even songwriting as I had translated my a cappella arrangement skills to music production. So the summer of 2013, in a motel room in Smyrna, GA, Safeer and I recorded his first original track, “Aam Jaam Lichu”. This song was a sleeper hit and as recently as last year was played on Bangladeshi radio stations as well as featured in multiple Instagram reels all over Dhaka. So yes, Aicha was the starting point for it all.
Zameer: The Band
As said before, Taal Tadka gave me some of my closest friends. One such friend was Samir. He was Safeer’s English class group partner in our freshman year so our interaction was very limited to a phone call we still laugh about. But a summer semester in Tech and some football (soccer) later, I learnt that he plays the guitar and sings. So I invited him to audition for Taal Tadka in our Junior year and no surprises guessing, he got in. It was around this time the Taal Tadka Jam session came to life and it lives in some version even today. But this was when we all meet up at an apartment and sing random songs into the night. It can go from rap to Sufi in seconds. But it is a great time.
In one such jam session, we began singing Aicha and the knowledge of the song created new bonds. Moments like these also let Samir share that he was also part of a band which was yet to have a name with our mutual friends Aadi and Sayan. Very soon, Safeer would fulfill the need of a lead guitarist in that band and they would go through a bizarre voting process to name the band “Zameer”.
Like all my friends, a lot can be said about them but a lot will stay between me and them. Samir is no exception. But his is another decade plus relationship that has grown beyond geographies and time zones despite seen the best and worst of each other.
Another thing Samir and I have in common is the love for Pakistan’s Coke Studio, which sounds very popular now. But there were fewer Indian fans who followed it then. Another dear friend Priya who will feature in various other themes in future articles, was a part of Taal Tadka and also a key figure in showing me a lot of the early Coke Studio music. However, I knew of the existence of Coke Studio purely as a happy mistake, through yet another version of Aicha. We will talk a little more about that soon but for now, we need to talk about Aadi and Sayan.
Aadi and Sayan as mentioned earlier were the founding members of the band Zameer along with Samir and the enigmatic bassist Alec whose leaving the band made way for an interesting replacement: me. I had already been gatecrashing Zameer rehearsals since I was tagging along with Safeer wherever he went and was comfortable enough with Samir to know I wasn’t a nuisance.
Sayan and Aadi are an alternate universe version of Safeer and me, at least in college. This was mainly because both the pairs were always seen together all across campus. People would be worried if one showed up somewhere without the other. But with Sayan having roots from West Bengal and Aadi hailing originally from Tamil Nadu, they matched the combination of Safeer being from Dhaka and my hometown being Bangalore, Karnataka. Turns out Georgia Tech needed two Bangla-South Indian pairs of bros and they all ended up in a band together.
History lesson aside, upon joining Zameer, I wanted to replicate some of the successes from Taal Tadka. Scheduled rehearsals with agendas led to a one off concert which was a big moment for all of us. But I also took up a personal challenge to produce a song with the band from scratch and publish it on iTunes. The song of choice: Aicha.
Now we’ve surveyed so many versions of the song. The original by Chef Khaled, the hit by Outlandish and the newer Coke Studio Urdu version sung by Amanat Ali while being backed up vocally by the very talented Zoe Viccaji. So we sat down and decided that the first verse will be the Coke Studio Urdu verse after which we continue to the Outlandish version that included a tribute to Khaled’s original.
So we had a plan set up. Safeer and I had literally grown up as Performer and Producer over the years so it was easy to lay the initial tracks. We had a bit of structure going. The I pulled in Samir with his own indie recording experience to add the rhythm guitar section through the song. The delicate plucking and luscious strumming had already created a beautiful soundscape to the song (I only use the word soundscape to make Samir laugh). Until now, I had worked with friends who were used to recording. Aadi and Sayan were new to this process and I was lucky that Aadi’s nervous energy matched mine so we worked hard to get the best out of the take. It was one of the first times I would push a very process driven Aadi to improvise and after a mild hesitation, he would oblige and play the keyboard like he never did before. Sayan helped out in a different direction. He would just show up and be at my mercy to figure things out. I could make all the mistakes in the world and he would just shrug it off and say let’s do it again.
After a couple of late nights, the song had come to shape. We had a bunch of bros performing a song in Urdu, English and French where all of it was recorded in a dorm room. We decided it would make sense to record a video in the same apartment for the actual song. It was at this moment when I realized I had no performing parts in the actual song as I was behind the scenes producing it. So the boys graciously put a guitar in my hand and said play the chords. My strumming hand is hidden behind Safeer so I could be doing anything. But that’s how we were as a band. We never left anyone behind.
Now there is a lot that happened that semester at college that will sound petty a decade later, so I will not go into the details. But the short story is, we had to show our value to perform at a gig and the various forces gave us rubbish reasons for rejecting us. One of it was, “Who will like this stuff?”. At the same time, I had shared our Aicha video on the Outlandish Facebook page. Within hours they responded thanking us and appreciating our effort. I still have that screenshot. While I had chosen to keep away from this element of college drama, I had the pleasure to tell my fellow bandmates that our music was never the issue as a global band took time to appreciate and validate us. So all was good.
For those who made it this far, I thank you for reading on. This has been a long and tedious post but I felt I needed to share the importance of music in my life. There are many more characters in my musical journey who will feature soon. But as I moved continents, moved from boy to man, music has always been a source of support that I could depend on. This music in my life is only as good as the people who made it a reality for me. So I thank all those mentioned as well as very dear friends who will be spoken of quite soon. It is amazing how one song can give you a support structure for a life time. With that, I am eternally grateful for Aicha, Aicha, In My Life.