Filed under: Bangladesh
Bangladesh has always been on my radar. For some reason, I’ve always had difficulty finding records from there. But this record? I did not even know about it until I stumbled upon it.
Fakir Alamgir / ফকির আলমগীর was one of the leading exponents of Gono Sangeet – the songs of the masses – in Bangladesh. Synonymous with voicing out for the rights of the voiceless – the perceived weak, the workers and the voiceless, he was one of the most beloved artistes of his generation.
Alamgir was born in Faridpur in 1950 – which at that time was East Pakistan. He started his music career in 1966. During his student life, he was active in politics. He was a student of Mass Communication and Journalism in Dhaka University.
Alamgir played an important role as a member of the cultural organizations Kranti Shilpi Gosthi and Gono Shilpi Gosthi, during the 1969 uprising in East Pakistan. He also worked with Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra / স্বাধীন বাংলা বেতার কেন্দ্র (Free Bengal Radio Centre) which was the radio broadcasting center of Bengali nationalist forces during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.
Catalog number MLP-0031 on Bangladesh Gramophone. No release date listed.
Filed under: Bangladesh
♬ Africa
Besides Libya, the other country that I have been really wanting to cover has been Bangladesh. When I sent out the call back in January, Peter Doolan – who curates the amazing Monrakplengthai – sent me this track. Originally I had intended for him to write a guest post, but then he up and moved to Thailand. So, he left it in my hands to fill in the blanks. All he could tell me was that “I found the tape in a sort of Bangladeshi plaza at Jackson Heights in Queens, New York.”
Bangladesh is a relatively new country, only officially being established in 1971. The country, which had previous been called East Pakistan after the partition of Bengal, won it’s independence in the Bangladesh Liberation War. After independence the new state endured famines, natural disasters and widespread poverty, as well as political turmoil and military coups.
Bangla music has been traditionally classified by the region of origin and / or the creators of the musical genre, such as Nazrul geeti (written and composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam), ghombhira (unique to a specific area in Bangladesh), etc. But in the post-independence period, several new minor musical groups emerged, mainly as playback songs for movies. These songs failed to fit into any particular genre, but seemed to be tied together by common theme of “music for the masses”. Most of the music tended to be aimed at the mainstream audience – popular catchy tunes with simple words that were far moved from the classical ragas. Hence, a miscellaneous category called Adhunik songeet – or Modern Song – was created.
M. A. Shoeb, along with Nazibul Haque, Kumar Biswajit, and Andrew Kishore released some very first Bangla pop songs in the beginning of 1980s. Shoeb has recorded at least a dozen albums, with a total of somewhere around 500 songs – some of which were for film and television soundtracks. His son, Saifullah Shoeb, has recently followed in his father’s footsteps in the music industry. As of 2007, M. A. Shoeb was living in Los Angeles, California and was still performing around the United States.
Catalog number D001 (listed as DV01 on the front cover) on Disco Recording. No other information available.
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