The New Nation - Internet Edition

Maswood Alam Khan

At one stage of your life when you have grown mellower with age, you exchange blows with a truth that says you are not young. At that stage of your life an inner voice will tell you: "It's all right to feel young, but at times it's wrong to act young".

Many guests defied that truth on the Thursday night on November 5 at the Gulshan International Club where Motimba---a UK musical band under the captaincy of Kishon Khan, a Bangladeshi---enthused the audience with a mixture of timba, salsa, soul and jazz. Rapid and lively beats of the band created a magical aura of songs and music. The concert was resounded by giant sound systems. Equipped with built-in microphones, stage light gadgets with multi colored beams automatically swiveled left and right and up and down in synch with the rhapsodies.

I was sipping a mild drink sitting on a chair placed on the lawn of the club under the open sky while witnessing an intriguing infusion of western culture into ours. A number of Bangladeshis were trying their best to mimic what the foreigners attending the concert were doing. I was amazed at the straightforwardness of a few Bangladeshi men and women in their 40s and 50s and quite a figure of Bangladeshi boys and girls in their teens and twenties partying with the uproarious crowd, constituting mostly foreigners.

They were indulging in slow and swing dances, pairing with both locals and expatriates, following the beats of songs and music of Latin and African genres. They were swaying their hips as they were spinning their followers between dance positions with a wave or a rock rhythm break. They were also smooching their partners while dancing. They were dressed in western fashions with slits and cuts in their trousers and shirts to make their beauty and nudity quite visible. Some of them were in a kind of daze under the influence of music or liquor. Only a few were idling away on the lawn sipping mild or hard drinks.

I was perhaps the only guest in the whole crowd of audience who, like a fish out of water, was struggling to fathom out what the concert was all about. The high volume of sounds with sharp pitches was numbing my auditory stimulus. I felt like leaving the place as immediately as possible. I couldn't understand a single word of the songs the Motimba troupe was so passionately singing and the crowd was so raptly hearing.

But queerly my mind was gradually sliding to attune into the harmony of the musical sounds, as if I were hearing some hums and drums I had heard in the distant past. Immersed in a different world, I found myself transfixed with the power of the alien music. When at the fag end of the concert the band was singing "Wahida Wantara Mira" I felt as if I were hearing my favorite song, "Ekta Gaan Likho Amaar Jonney" (Compose, please, a song for me) by Protima Bondopadhay. My soul felt spiritually connected with sounds of music my distant ancestors in Africa or in Latin America made. I could not leave the lawn of the International Club before the partying was over in the dead of night.

There are some sights and sounds that, though unfamiliar, touch a chord within us. Those sights and sounds are in fact’ registered in our genes, some very deeply and some flippantly. We can instantly recognise those sights and sounds, some intensely and some flimsily, never even seeing or hearing them before.

A pet dog that never lived in a forest or never saw a snake in a jungle will reflexively bristle with rage if the dog ever sights a snake on the backyard of his master's home in a city. Fear of snakes is deeply ingrained in the genes of dogs.

Romanians are crazily fond of Hindi songs and Italians, like us, are very much emotional. Somehow or other Romanians and Italians are perhaps genetically connected with Indians and Bangladeshis.

There is an intangible commonality among all the humans living in this world, no matter we speak in different languages or live in different cultures. For ages since primordial era we, carrying our genetic imprints intact, have been migrating from one continent to another. Only pigments of our skins and languages of our vocabulary are getting changed due to changed surroundings. But, deep down we genealogically belong to one source of origin, hence to one thread of human gene. Diverse cultures of our ancestors though scattered all over the world are very much ingrained in our psyche. So, when we hear a sound of an African drum or a song of Cuban origin, a chord deep in our consciousness is reflexively struck to evoke our buried reminiscence.

One day the intense rhyme of Timba, the Afro-Cuban melody, touched a chord with a young boy in his twenties when he was doing a stint in Cuba. The young boy in his childhood didn't like to play piano. He rather studied Economics in the university as a young man. But Timba melody was his calling, the young man realized as he listened to the bottomless and passionate tone and tenor of the melody. He is Kishon Khan, a Bangladeshi by birth, who was groomed and naturalized in the United Kingdom. Kishon Khan in collaboration with his acquaintances from different continents created in 1999 a band named Motimba with a view to bridging the gap between cultures.

Invited by Excalibur Entertainment Motimba undertook their first ever visit to Bangladesh.

By their dazzling performances at different hotels and clubs the troupe has already made their mark on music aficionados in Dhaka showing how a motley combination of alien songs and music, as diverse as Latin jazz, Afro beats and Cuban Timba, can be blended into a universal genre to enamor any audience from any part of the globe.

Motimba declares their troupe as the only Latin band playing urban Cuban grooves with a London sound---a new recipe brought to the streets of London via La Havana, Cuba.