benju master
Pasni, Balochistan, Pakistan
Photo courtesy of Jan Eric Wendt
Pakistan’s Ustad Noor Bakhsh was one of the most unlikely internet sensations of the post-pandemic era. Born into a nomadic family of herders, and taught music by his father, Noor Bakhsh has been playing since he was a child. Though he’s worked professionally as the accompanist of singer Sabzal Sami for decades, he only came to the world’s attention as a soloist in 2022, at the age of 77—thanks to Pakistani anthropologist Daniyal Ahmed, who tracked Bakhsh down after watching him perform online. He persuaded Bakhsh to record music and shoot video for Instagram, and later for an internet series called Boiler Room. The results went viral, paving the way for the release of Bakhsh’s 2022 debut solo album, Jingul, which Pitchfork praised as “the kind of music that leaves you grasping for the spiritual and indefinable, that burrows into your soul and glows there.” He made his first international tour of Europe in 2023, and makes his North American debut on this tour.
Part of what caught the world’s attention was Ustad Noor Bakhsh’s unusual instrument. He’s a master of the electric benju, a rare, five-stringed, keyed zither that’s unique to the Balochistan region of Pakistan. It’s a captivating, idiosyncratic instrument said to be based on an imported Japanese children’s toy and teaching instrument called the taishōgoto. Noor Bakhsh further modifies this unusual instrument by electrifying it through a single pickup and an aging Phillips amplifier found in a Karachi market, all powered by a motorcycle battery. The sound is clear with a bright, sustained tone that’s closer to an electric guitar than anything else.
Noor Bakhsh plays his benju to devastating, virtuosic effect. A brilliant and soulful improvisor, Bakhsh’s marriage of melodic ornamentation and spare, electric grooves has been compared to Ali Farka Touré and other guitar slingers from the Sahel. Noor Bakhsh’s repertoire is diverse and deep, reflecting Balochistan’s legacy as a centuries-old trading crossroads: Persian and Arabic ghazals, South Asian ragas, Kurdish melodies, Bollywood favorites, and his own experimental compositions. But the foundation of his sound is the Balochi tradition called zahirok.
Zahirok is a set of traditional songs and melodies at the heart of Balochi folk music, sometimes described as Balochi classical music. Sung by men and women alike and usually accompanied by such traditional stringed instruments as the suroz and ghaychak, zahirok songs offer passionate narratives about separation, absence, and longing—for lovers, family, and home. The name itself translates into “burning with longing,” and it’s the perfect expression of a people whose original homeland is divided between Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for whom ancient caravan journeys and sea voyages have given way to contract labor abroad in the Gulf states and elsewhere. The geographical heart of the music is the coastal Makran region of Balochistan that Ustad Noor Bakhsh calls home, and he finds endless inspiration in the landscape—even in the birdsongs of the region. “Birds make different kinds of sounds, but it’s about how they are memorized in the imagination,” he told Songlines magazine in 2022. “When I hear the birds sing, I try to tune my benju to their voices.”