Two Different Worlds - Afghan Music For Afghanis and Khariji

Two Different Worlds: Afghan Music for Afghanistanis and Kharejis
Author(s): John Baily

Source: Ethnomusicology Forum , June 2010, Vol. 19, No. 1, Ethnomusicology and the
Music Industries (June 2010), pp. 69-88
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the British Forum for
Ethnomusicology
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Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 19, No. 1, June 2010, pp. 69-88 ?J Routledge
jjj^^ Taylor & Francis Group
Two Different Worlds: Afghan Music

for Afghanistanis and Kharejis
John Baily
This paper examines the two largely separate worlds of audio recordings of Afghan music
made for the Afghan market and Afghan music recordings that have found their way
into the 'world music market. It shows how recordings aimed at the two domains have
remained largely independent, and offers some suggestions as to how and why this should
he. The new Afghan popular music on compact disc, privileging the use of electronic
keyboards with their programmable percussion libraries, is of little interest to the world
music audience, which seeks the exotic timbres and 'authenticity of non-Western
instruments. Packaging, lack of content information and the marketing of Afghan
produced recordings are also part of the explanation. Conversely, recordings of traditional
music represent an Afghan culture that Afghans have moved away from in their quest for
modernity. The 'two different worlds syndrome probably applies to other transnational
communities whose creative centres lie in the diaspora rather than in the original
homeland.
Keywords: Afghanistan; Herat; Audio-recordings; Ustad Qassem; Ahmad Zahir; Amir

Jan Sabori; Ensemble Kaboul; 'World Music
How can we enter into the international market, the world market, so that we can take
a little share? (Ahmad Hamidi, Afghan record producer, Fremont, California, 2000)
This paper deals with the two largely separate worlds of audio-recordings of Afghan
music made for the Afghan market and Afghan music recordings that find their way
to the 'world music' market. The former are produced by Afghan businesses in
John Baily is Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit at Goldsmiths,
University of London. His research is focused mainly on the music of Afghanistan. Trained originally in
experimental psychology, he is well known for his pioneering work on the biology of music-making. He is a
strong advocate of learning to perform as a research technique in ethnomusicology, and on the use of video as an
investigative medium. He has published numerous articles, CDs and DVDs, and is currently working on a
monograph entitled War, Exile, and the Global Circulation of Afghanistan's Music. Correspondence to: John Baily,
Afghanistan Music Unit, Department of Music, Goldsmiths, New Cross, London SE 14 6NW, UK. Email:
j.baily@gold.ac.uk
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online)/10/010069-20

? 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17411911003669608

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70 /. Baily
various places, especially in the United States and Germany, and also in Pakistan
(where a lot of the music products made in the West are copied illegally), while those
for a Western audience are largely recordings made by non-Afghan sound-recordists,
often as field recordings connected with ethnomusicological research. This paper
looks at the two different worlds of Afghan music for Afghanistanis and kharejis
(foreigners), and seeks to understand how and why they coexist.1 The pattern
established here is probably repeated in many other music cultures and reveals
something significant concerning the commodification of the musics of the world for
Western audiences.
The data on which this paper is based were collected in a somewhat haphazard
manner during my two years' fieldwork in Herat (western Afghanistan) in the 1970s,
and from a number of short field trips to various sites of Afghan settlement since
then. My interest in recordings increased in 2006 when conducting research on
Afghan music in London and London's musical connections and communications
with Kabul, Hamburg (with a large Afghan community) and Dublin (with a very
small one). My research over the past 35 years has moved from a detailed
ethnography of music-making in a provincial Afghan city to focus on those processes
of globalisation produced as a result of (generally) forced migratory movements.
With no forward planning, my work has led me to confront the complex matter of
music and migration. Most recently it has focused on Afghan music in Australia,
which has shed further light on Afghan recording practices.2 Audio-recordings
emerged as one of the main channels for the circulation of music within the Afghan
transnational community. This is a very large topic and the present paper does little
more than scratch the surface. There are also large gaps in my data. For example, I
have rather little information about recordings made in Afghanistan during the
period when a succession of leftist regimes was in control, from 1978 to 1992. Some
of my research is documented in a series of films (Baily 2009) and reference to these is
made when appropriate.
The paper presents a brief history of recording Afghan music, from the 78-rpm
discs of the Gramophone Company in the 1920s to the production of CDs by small
Afghan companies in the West. It then looks briefly at recordings made by Western
ethnomusicologists since the mid-1950s. It is concluded that the new Afghan popular
music produced by Afghans in compact disc (CD) format, privileging the use of
electronic keyboards with their programmable percussion libraries, is of little interest
to the world music audience, which seeks the exotic timbres and 'authenticity' of
non-Western instruments. Conversely, recordings of traditional music made by
ethnomusicologists and others represent an Afghan culture that Afghans have moved
away from in their quest for modernity.
Early 78-rpm Records made for an Afghan Audience
The importance of the Gramophone Company's recordings in many parts of the

world at the start of the twentieth century is well known (Gronow 1981). The

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Ethnomusicology Forum 71
Company's activities in the Indian subcontinent have been studied in detail by Farrell
(1993, 1997), who noted, amongst other things, the way that long performances
could be successfully pr?cised within the time constraints of the 78-rpm disc. A
number of musicians from Afghanistan made records for the Gramophone
Company's HMV label in the 1920s?notably Ustad Qassem, court singer to the
progressive Afghan ruler, Amir Amanullah. Ustad Qassem presumably visited India
for this purpose, probably on more than one occasion. In the Gramophone
Company's Afghan List for June 1926, part of their Indian Native Catalogue
published in Calcutta, we find no less than 40 78-rpm records (80 sides) under the
name of 'Kassim [i.e. Qassem] Afghan'.3
In the catalogue, Ustad Qassem is described as 'His Highness, Amir of
Afghanistan's Court Singer'. A photograph of Ustad Qassem and his ensemble
published in the record catalogue shows the singer, who accompanies himself on
harmonium, with rubab, tabla, dilruba and two sarangis. Ustad Qassem wears
Western evening dress and his accompanists' uniform comprises piran o t?mban
(traditional long shirt and baggy trousers) and turban. The sartorial contrast shows
the high rank of Ustad Qassem. The catalogue reveals that while the majority of Ustad
Qassem's songs were in Persian and Pashto (the two principal languages of
Afghanistan), he also sang in Punjabi, Multani, Urdu and Hindi. Many of his songs
used classical ghazals as lyrics, and some were based on folk songs. Several of the
ghazals listed in the catalogue are described as being tarz-e Qassemi (in the Qassemi
style), but quite what this means is not clear. Other Afghan singers listed in the same
catalogue are Qurban Ali Khan (five sides) and Khan Jan Afghan (12 sides). The
records raise many questions. Ustad Qassem's father came to Kabul from Kashmir yet
here Qassem is described as 'Afghan'. Who bought the records? Were they all exported
to Afghanistan, or were they also directed towards Afghan communities long settled
in North India, especially the Rohilkhand area?4 And there were also many educated
people in India at that time who knew Persian and could appreciate Persian ghazals as
sung by Afghan vocalists.
It seems likely that wind-up gramophones were not uncommon in Afghanistan
at this time. In his book The Road to Oxiana, the British archaeologist, academic
and traveller Robert Byron describes the Behzad Hotel in Herat where he stayed in
1933:
The second and third [downstairs rooms] are filled with marble-topped tables, and
hung with European scenes painted on glass by an Indian familiar with the early
numbers of the Illustrated London News. Here too are Seyid Mahmud's desk, a
cabinet gramophone on legs from Bombay, and a pile of Indian records. (Byron
1937, 113)
Some of those 'Indian records' might well have been recordings by Ustad Qassem and
other singers from Afghanistan made in the 1920s. Byron's gramophone was in a
hotel; restaurants and teahouses may also have provided entertainment for their
customers through this medium, and music-loving members of the educated urban

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72 /. Baily
elite were apparently also owners of gramophones in their homes (Ustad Mash'al,
personal communication, Herat 1974).
Radio broadcasting came late to Afghanistan. An effective service that could be
received in most parts of the country was not established until the mid-1940s. The
buildings of Radio Kabul were located on the edge of the old city, not far from
Kucheh Kharabat, the musicians' quarter. Ownership of radio receivers was very
limited, and, to ensure the dissemination of radio broadcasts, receivers in a number
of cities were linked to loudspeaker systems in their main streets and parks. They
broadcast the news, music and other programmes to a predominantly male audience
in public places. In the 1960s a new radio station for what was now called Radio
Afghanistan was built in the outskirts of Kabul.5
Radio Kabul was of crucial importance in the creation and dissemination of a new
kind of Afghan popular music that brought together elements of the music cultures
of the two largest ethnic groups, Pashtuns and Tajiks. This hybridisation was
facilitated by the descendants of Indian court musicians, whose knowledge of
Hindustani music theory and terminology and high standards of performance were
important for organising small ensembles and large orchestras at the radio station.
They played a key role in training musicians, both professionals and amateurs. There
was some input also of Western music, initially through the efforts of Turkish band
masters. The modernity of Radio Kabul, and the physical and social separation of
performer and audience that enabled, for example, female performers to be heard by
a male audience, bestowed a new respectability on amateur-turned-professional
performers, including some significant women singers such as Farida Mahwash (Baily
1994).
Music broadcasts from Radio Kabul were live until the move in the 1960s to the
new Radio Afghanistan studios, when quarter-inch tape-recording machines became
available. In this period a number of 78-rpm records of Afghan music were
manufactured in the USSR, at a time when there was a heavy presence of Soviet
advisers from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the radio station?leading, as Mark Slobin
puts it:
to the formation of a performers' training institute and large ensembles patterned

after those of Soviet Central Asia, home of the advisers. This activity extended at
one time to pressing Afghan radio songs on 78rpm discs in Tashkent, the only
specimens of Afghan sound recordings and now prized collectors' items. (Slobin
1974, 244)
These were shipped back to Kabul, and could be purchased from the radio
station archive (Abdul Wahab Madadi, personal communication, 2008). The only
one of these 'prized collectors' items' in my possession is by the celebrated male
singer from the Logar Valley, Salaam Logari, who performs in the traditional
vernacular Logari style that emphasises short instrumental dance pieces between
units of text.6

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Cassette Culture in Afghanistan7
By the late 1960s to early 1970s, Japanese-made cassette machines were becoming
quite common in Afghanistan. The standard models were what Manuel describes as
'two-in-ones' ( 1993, 60), brought back by Afghan migrant workers from the Gulf and
Iran. These combined a radio and cassette recorder/playback machine, which allowed
direct recording from the radio, and had a cheap external microphone, often attached
to the extended aerial as a makeshift microphone stand by the owner when recording
live music.
When I began my fieldwork in Herat in 1973 I noticed immediately how these
machines were brought to public concerts held during Ramazan (the month of
fast). Attending concerts by the Kabuli singer Amir Mohammad (Figure 1), with his
mainly Herati accompanists, I saw an array of tape recorders on and by the edge of
the stage, with the singer occasionally adjusting the microphones and directing the
placement of more machines as they arrived with their owners, who clattered about
checking their recording levels, changing batteries, turning over cassettes or
inserting new ones. Purchasing an admission ticket gave one the right to make
one's own recording. I also benefited from this system; I too could record the
concert free of charge. This principle prevailed over the five consecutive Ramazam
when I was in Herat in the 1970s. The only exceptions were the concerts of
Haji Hamahang in 1976, when a modest extra charge was levied for making
recordings.
Figure 1 Amir Mohammad performing in 1973.

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74 /. Baily
The production of commercial audio-cassettes of Afghan music in Afghanistan

began in Kabul in the early 1970s. This is a period when Afghanistan still enjoyed
relative political stability and calm as a gradually modernising neutral country,
optimistically described as the potential 'Switzerland of Asia' (Caroe 1965, 550), with
Kabul as the 'Paris of the East'.8 The Hamidi family owned a department store in
Shahr-e Now (Kabul's New City), and its wide range of luxury goods contained some
hi-fi audio equipment, including turntables for playing LPs, and cassette players. In
addition, the store stocked a range of western LPs and audio-cassettes, mainly to sell
to foreigners connected with embassies and development aid programmes such as
USAID.
A younger member of the family, Ahmad Hamidi, realised that there was a
possibility for marketing audio-cassettes of Afghan music. He was a frequent visitor
to London for business reasons and imported some high-quality reel-to-reel
recording equipment; he established the first privately owned recording studio in
Afghanistan in about 1972. He called his recording business 'Music Center'. When I
met him in Fremont, California in 2000, he told me that he had invested US$100,000
in his business, a great deal of money at that time. Music Center recorded in two
track stereo at 15 ips, and employed Ali Alemi as the sound engineer, a man who was
trained in this field in India and also worked as an engineer for Radio Afghanistan
and Afghan Film. Music Center's first release was of Ustad Mohammad Hossein
Sarahang, Afghanistan's leading singer of North Indian classical music and Persian
language ghazals sung in the Kabuli style. Other recordings were mainly of currently
popular singers who had reached prominence largely through radio broadcasts, such
as Ahmad Zahir and Salma. The singers were paid an advance, usually without
written contracts, which were unusual at a time when in the business field a man's
word was his bond. Music Center's business activities included cassette copying, and
from the outset cassettes were released with an inlay in colour showing a portrait of
the artist. Hamidi told me that he had recorded something like 1200 songs. His
business was closed down in 1978 after the leftist coup that brought President Nur
Ahmad Taraki to power.9 Hamidi was able to preserve about 65% of his recording
masters, and in due course shipped them to the United States. In 2000 he was
planning to re-establish his Music Center business and to market his recordings in
CD format. Following the example of Music Center there were other cassette
companies in Kabul, such as Afghan Music, Aryan Music and Farhad Music.
When I was living and researching in Herat in the 1970s there were a number of
shops selling cassettes. Some cassettes were the products of companies like Music
Center in Kabul. But these shops also made their own cassettes of local artists, in what
is best described as a cottage recording industry. These cassettes were replicated in
small numbers, perhaps even copied individually to order. They had no special inlays
but might be graced with a picture of an Indian or Pakistani film star folded into the
box. The title of the cassette would be hand-written on the paper label stuck on the
cassette itself.

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In 1977 I attended in Herat a recording session for the amateur Kabuli singer
Khotam, a student of the revered and acclaimed Ustad Sarahang. Cassette shop
proprietor Azim, whose shop was in the centre of Herat city, organised the recording
session. This took place in the evening in Azim's home in a village near the city.
Khotam, singing and playing harmonium, was accompanied by dutar, dilruba, and
tabla. Azim recorded on a stereo Sanyo cassette deck, miking up the tabla and voice
separately. In many cases he stopped after a song had been recorded, and there was a
lot of playback to check that the recordings were satisfactory. Material was carefully
selected: Azim did not want any Indian classical music, and turned his machine off
when Khotam sang a rag at my request. The only song specifically requested by Azim
was Mullah Mohammad Jan. Azim tended to turn on the recording machine just after
a song had begun, so that he missed the first part of the vocal introduction (alap).
Halfway through the session, Azim took a loop of small bells (zang)y the type tied
round a baby's ankle, and shook these in imitation of a dancing boy's ankle bells. He
kept this up for most of the rest of the session. The zang obviously added what Azim
judged to be a crucial element in the sound. Khotam felt the same way, it seems,
because a few times when Azim stopped shaking the bells he signalled to Azim to
resume. I offer this account of a Herati recording session because it reveals the very
low level of technology involved in the production of cassettes outside the
sophisticated studios of Kabul in the 1970s. I have no idea how many copies of
this cassette were sold by Azim, nor how much he paid Khotam.
During the period when the Afghan resistance (the Mujahideen) was fighting the
Afghan government and Russian troops (1978-92), the Pakistani city of Peshawar,
just across the border and linked to Afghanistan by the Khyber Pass, had a thriving
cassette industry. Exiled Afghan singers like Shah Wali Khan10 recorded mainly the
usual diet of love songs demanded by their Pakistani Pashtun audiences, but there
were also cassettes of songs about the war recorded by Afghan musicians. Little
research has been conducted into these recordings; some were long epics recounting
the exploits of particular Mujahideen units and their military campaigns. It was
common for the sounds of gunfire to be added to the tracks, or guns were imitated
on tabla drums (Baily 2001, 30). It is not quite clear who these cassettes were aimed
at. The majority of the exiled Afghans were living in camps controlled by the various
Mujahideen parties, and music was banned in these camps (ibid., 28), although no
doubt a certain amount of clandestine listening went on. Although many Mujahideen
were opposed to music it seems that some of these cassettes were purchased by
Mujahideen fighters and taken to Afghanistan for entertainment purposes. A former
Mujahid interviewed in the film Breaking the Silence explained the importance of such
recordings to the men engaged in the fighting.
Although it was a holy war we still listened to music. We were not narrow-minded.
Music was our entertainment. Here is an example of what we used to listen to [puts
on tape recorder]. There was the sound of weapons firing. These tapes calmed us
down when we were fighting. When we sat with our friends this was our
entertainment. (Broughton 2002, 14-30)

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76 /. Baily
I have no direct experience of the cassette industry in leftist-controlled Afghanistan
at this time of war. According to Abdul Wahab Madadi, a leading expert on Afghan
music (personal communication, 2009), himself a well-known singer from Herat and
Head of Music at Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) in Kabul for some years, the
privately owned cassette businesses were closed down by the government, and all
their recording equipment, tape masters, and stocks of cassettes were confiscated, on
the grounds that their kind of music was not suited to the new revolutionary times. A
new organisation was set up, called Afghan Music, which was in effect an association
of singers, instrumentalists and composers, under the directorship of Masur Jamal, a
well-known singer and composer. Afghan Music established its own cassette
production unit, releasing cassettes under the name of Afghan Music (not to be
confused with the pre-revolutionary label of the same name). In this way, the
government exercised tight control over what appeared on cassette.
The succession of leftist governments in general supported music, which they
regarded as indicative of the type of secular society they believed they had established.
The authorities were not in favour of Afghanistans art music, associated as it was
with former royal patronage from the 1860s until 1973 (when King Zahir was
deposed by his cousin and brother-in-law Sardar Mohammad Daud); on the other
hand, they were supportive of regional folk music traditions. In Kabul itself, popular
music using Western instruments was thriving, following the trend set by Ahmad
Zahir, who used instruments such as electric organ, trumpet, bass guitar and drum
kit. Ahmad Zahir died in suspicious circumstances in 1979, possibly murdered
because he came from an elite background and his recent songs could be interpreted
as being against the regime. Around 1980 the newly opened television station in
Kabul had an important role in broadcasting musical performances and promoting
new artists. Two orchestras of young musicians were established at this time at RTA:
Barati ('Rain), led by Farhad Darya; and Saman, led by Wahid Qassemi (a grandson
of the aforementioned Ustad Qassem). Today both singers are superstars of the new
Afghan music, based in the United States (Farhad Darya) and Canada (Wahid
Qassemi). Their fame and popularity in 1980s Kabul was mainly due to their
performances on radio and television. It is not clear to what extent cassettes produced
by Afghan Music in Kabul at this time were available to Afghans living in exile.
During the Coalition Government (1992-96), musicians in Afghanistan were
under severe pressure (Baily 2001, 31-4), and there was very little music on radio and
television. Cassette shops were still in business. Due to shortages of electricity after
the long war with the Mujahideen, the amount of broadcasting time was severely
reduced. Restrictions on musical activity were increased once the Taliban were in
control. Now all music-making that involved musical instruments (with the possible
exception of the daira frame drum) was banned (ibid., 34^2). This was the era of
broken music cassettes nailed to wooden posts and pyres of musical instruments
destroyed in public. But clearly a good deal of clandestine musical activity was taking
place, with secret music sessions held literally underground in basement rooms, and
with people listening to cassettes of music from the past or smuggled in from

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neighbouring countries such as Pakistan. In Kabul there was the production of

cassettes, but these were of Taliban tarar?as, the so-called 'Taliban chants', that
extolled Taliban values and commemorated their martyrs. Shops that had sold music
cassettes before now sold Taliban tarar?as, while continuing to sell music cassettes
'under the counter'.11
Compact Discs in the Diaspora
In the years following the start of the war in 1978, several million Afghans went into
exile, mostly in Pakistan and Iran, and hundreds of thousands also made their way to
North America, Europe and Australia. By this time the audio-cassette was being
replaced by the CD. The production of CDs by Afghan-owned businesses in the West
probably started in the 1980s, to provide music for Afghans in exile. There appear to
have been two main centres for their production. One was Alexandria, in Virginia,
USA, home to companies such as Marco Polo and Afghan Music Production. The
other was Hamburg, which has a wealthy Afghan business sector.
In 2000 I carried out six weeks of fieldwork in the Fremont-Hayward-Union City
area (near San Francisco), which at that time had an Afghan population estimated at
about 60,000 people. Distinctive traditional Afghan instruments like the rubab, dutar
and tanbur were hard to find in the United States, although two Indian instruments
very commonly used in Afghanistan?the harmonium and the tabla?were readily
available from Indian music shops in the San Francisco Bay area. The younger
generation of Afghans, brought up and educated in the United States and much
influenced by American culture, favoured the electronic keyboard as the modern
alternative to the harmonium. The keyboard brought with it some important musical
ideas from Western music, literally wired into its electronic circuitry and the software
sold with it. From this encounter the development of the 'new Afghan music' was
encouraged (Baily 2005a).
In the new format, the central figure remained the solo singer, now playing
keyboard rather than harmonium. The drum machine built into the keyboard
provided rhythmic accompaniment, programmed to play the principal rhythms used
in Afghan music, Geda, Dadra and Mogholi (which might be characterised as being in
4/4, 6/8 and 7/8, respectively). One advantage of this set-up was that a single
performer could now operate as a one-man band. However, very often in live
performance at a big wedding party, a tabla player would be added, which potentially
gave more rhythmic interest, and a symbolic contact with the music of the past and
with Kabul. The musical style had also undergone some degree of Westernisation,
with the introduction of simple harmonic principles borrowed from Western music.
For an innovator like Qader Eshpari, one of the pioneers of the new music in
California, the harmonisation of Afghan music came from the chord generator built
into the keyboard he used (Baily 2005a, 227). But other young Afghan musicians
came to understand something about chords and harmony by taking piano lessons,
or by showing Afghan songs to the music teacher at school to get help. They

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78 /. Baily
discovered that three or four chords are usually enough for the 'average' Afghan
popular song.12
Perhaps connected with the diminished command of their native languages, the
songs favoured by these new Afghan musicians and their young audiences in the
United States had fairly simple texts. Gone was the Sufi ghazal with its complex
multi-faceted poetry. Now they performed old folk or old popular songs, or newly
composed songs, of which there were many. A lot of what they played was dance
music, with simple repetitive lyrics performed at a fast and steady tempo. It was the
logical extension of initiatives that went back to the 1960s from modern Afghan
singers like Ahmad Zahir. Such dance music is often referred to (in English) as 'fast
music'.
Fremont was not a centre for the production of Afghan music CDs, but CD sales
were certainly an important part of the Afghan music scene there, sold mainly in the
type of store known in the United States as an Afghan market', which typically
stocked all the necessary ingredients for Afghan cuisine, including halal meat and
freshly baked Afghan bread, often from a bakery at the back of the store. Those stores
also sold Afghan national costumes for young girls to wear on festive occasions,
books in Dari, Pashto and Arabic, ornaments and wall-clocks in the shape of
Afghanistan, as well as a large selection of music CDs and DVDs, including many of
Indian film music, which remained very popular with Afghan audiences. I observed a
number of similar stores in the Steindamm area of Hamburg, and in Australia in the
Auburn area of Sydney and the Dandenong area of Melbourne, where they are called
Afghan groceries'.13 It is surely significant that music should be sold in food shops,
and there is an interesting connection here between diet and identity: 'you are what
you eat'. Likewise, music and dance CDs and DVDs confer identity. In any case, music
is often described as qaza-ye ruh in Afghanistan, meaning spiritual food or
nourishment, an idea derived from Sufism (Baily 1988, 152).
The recording businesses that produced the CDs sold in Fremont were mostly
based in Alexandria, Virginia. When I returned from Fremont in 2000 I brought with
me 70 CDs I had purchased there. This can hardly be regarded as a random sample.
The items were bought in various Afghan markets in Fremont, five or six at a time,
and were purchased because they were by artists I knew something about, or in many
cases, especially with younger people, who looked interesting from the cover picture
and who were likely to represent recent developments in the United States.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to see what categories the CDs in this collection fall
into.
1. New singers and instrumentalists based in the West (27 CDs).

2. Art music from the past (11 CDs, including 7 of Ustad Sarahang).
3. Regional music (9 CDs).
4. Recordings of singers from Afghanistan who went into exile (9 CDs).
5. Reissues of recordings made in the past by well-known singers of popular music
associated with Radio Kabul/Radio Afghanistan (7 CDs).

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6. Art music from the present (5 CDs).

7. Miscellaneous (4 CDs).
Looking at the labels on which the 70 CDs were released: 16 were on Marco Polo, 7 on
Afghan Music, 5 on Nillab, 5 on Negah, 4 on Watan, 4 on Khorasan, 3 on Chopandaz,
3 on Heart Chant, 3 on CineVision, 2 on Pamir and 2 on Tarana Film. For the
remaining 16 CDs, only 1 CD has been produced per label or no business name has
been given at all. We can assume that these are one-off self-publications of the kind
that are the norm in Australia (see Figure 2).
In 2006 I visited Hamburg for the first time, to meet up with Abdul Wahab
Madadi. Besides the usual stores selling Afghan groceries and music in the
Steindamm area, I was struck by one large shop devoted to music CDs and DVDs.
This was the recently opened Kayhan Music, owned by Aref Kayhan. The shop itself
does not seem to have been economically viable because a year later it shared its space
with an Afghan travel agency, and in 2008 it had closed altogether. But the record
shop was only part of the Kayhan enterprise: Aref and his family ran a recording
business, with a large studio in the basement of the family home. Aref Kayhan had
had some role as a singer on RTA in the 1980s, and he ran the studio with his two
sons Farhad and Khaled, both of whom also worked as semi-professional musicians.
Khaled had worked extensively as a keyboardist with Farhad Darya.
When I visited the studio in 2006 we discussed the problems of getting the CD
masters the Kayhan studio produces turned into CDs for sale. While it would be
possible for them to get their CDs reproduced more cheaply in, for example, Pakistan
or China, they were very aware of the need to maintain a high-quality product.
Various faults could develop in the replication process, tracks might disappear and
distortions appear. Things could go wrong with printing the label. Dealing with a
Figure 2 Contrasting CD covers from (a) and (b) modern Afghan repertory, aimed at the
Afghan buyers. The earlier example shows Ustad Sarahang, the later, Habib Qaderi from
California.

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80 /. Baily
distant company made it hard to keep a check on these matters, so Kayhan Music
preferred to deal with a local German company in Hamburg. For Kayhan Music,
maintaining a reputation as a provider of a reliable product was very important. In
this respect their products contrast markedly with the cheap CDs produced in flimsy
cardboard covers in Pakistan, which are very often pirated copies of recordings made
in the West. They frequently turn out to be faulty. Kayhan Music is a good example of
a small media company, recording and disseminating music CDs and also involved in
the promotion of concerts by Afghan artists in Germany.14
In Australia the situation is rather different (Baily, forthcoming). The total number
of Afghans in Australia is less than 25,000, too few to support media companies of the
kind found in the United States and Germany. As in Fremont and Hamburg, the
main outlet for Afghan CDs is the Afghan grocery. There you can find a large stock of
CDs and DVDs imported from the United States and Germany, and a much smaller
selection of locally produced Afghan-Australian CDs. Visiting Australia in 2009, I
acquired 14 such CDs. They represented a wide range of styles, instrumental and
vocal art music, semi-classical fusions, new music with voice and keyboard, and
Afghan rap. Six of the CDs were recorded in the Sash Studio in Sydney, founded by
the musician Nasruddin Sarshar (tabla and sitar) and managed by his two sons. Yama
is a talented tabla player (and a student of Zakir Hussein), while Ali, the studio's
recording engineer and music arranger, has had training from the Roland Company
(embracing sound engineering, basic music theory, and keyboard performance from
Western staff notation). Located in the garage of the large new house occupied by the
Sarshar family in the Blacktown area of Sydney, the recording studio is small, little
more than a square metre in area, and the control booth is the same size.
Unlike Kayhan Music and CD companies in the United States, Sash Studio does
not offer a fee to the artists it records. It caters for those who want to make their own
CDs. Normally a singer approaches the studio to suggest making a recording. The
singer records the songs he wants on his CD, accompanied by his own harmonium, to
a click track (all of the Afghan singers so far recorded in Australia are male). Then,
over the next few weeks, Ali Sarshar creates 'the music'?that is, the accom
paniment?getting his brother Yama to lay down some percussion tracks played on
tabla and/or dhol. Once the accompaniment has been finalised the singer returns to
the studio and re-records his vocals over the 'music', now without harmonium. The
cost for the CD master, plus artwork for the CD cover (also designed by the multi
talented Ali Sarshar), is around Aus$3000. The artist pays a CD duplication company
$2000 to get 1000 copies made, and it is up to the artist to arrange distribution. By
the time the retailers have taken their cut there is little if any profit to be made by the
artist. This kind of CD is a form of self-publication, and is used to promote the artist
and get bookings for live gigs. Afghan-Australian artists find it difficult to get their
products distributed elsewhere in the West, and as a consequence there is not much
flow of Afghan music out of Australia.
Finally, in the case of Ireland, with its very small Afghan community (no more
than a few hundred people), there is no production of Afghan music CDs, and no

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shop in which to buy them. The only significant singer in Ireland is Hakim Sanaie,
who had some presence on RTA in the late 1970s-early 1980s. He has a CD entitled
Zelaykha that he recorded in Iran with Iranian accompanists. This is evidently like the
Afghan-Australian productions, being privately made and distributed.
Recordings of Afghan Music Made for a Western Audience
So far we have been considering the production of Afghan music recordings for
Afghanistanis. Now we turn to those made for the kharijis, the non-Afghans. The first
Afghan recordings produced for a Western audience were released on long-playing
33-rpm records. The first release seems to have been Musique d'Afghanistan, a 10-inch
LP on the La Bo?te ? Musique label, recorded in 1955 by Alain Delapraz and released
in 1956. Delapraz wrote a book about Afghanistan published in 1964, and is
described in the record notes as 'Collaborateur du Mus?e d'Ethnographie de
Neuch?tel', indicating that the recordings were the outcome of a university-sponsored
field trip to collect music from various parts of Afghanistan.15
Other early releases include: Afghanistan et Iran?Disques Vogue, Collection Loisirs,
Collection Mus?e de VHomme, a single LP recorded by J. C. and S. Lubtchansky in
1956; Music of Afghanistan, recorded by Radio Kabul and released in 1961 on Ethnic
Folkways; the B?renreiter UNESCO Anthology of World Music volume The Music of
Afghanistan-, Lorraine Sakata's LPs on Lyrichord, Folk Music of Afghanistan Volumes 1
and 2; and Mark Slobin's three-LP set, The Music of Afghanistan, published on the
Society for Ethnomusicology's short-lived Anthology label. Perusal of these and other
early LPs of Afghan music made for the Western music market prompts the following
observations.
Perhaps following the example set by Folkways in New York, these publications had
scholarly and educational intentions. Folkways itself was a low-budget private
company, but the rest of the LPs listed above received a measure of state or
institutional sponsorship; they were the outcome of anthropological or ethnomusi
cological research. The best example of institutional sponsorship is the UNESCO
Collection of Traditional Music founded in 1961 by Alain Dani?lou in collaboration
with the International Music Council, with technical and financial assistance from the
now defunct Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in Berlin.
The B?renreiter UNESCO Anthology of World Music series was published in 12-inch
LP format, starting in 1961. The record covers for these LPs had an innovative
format, opening out into a multi-paged booklet in French, German and English
(Figure 3). The motivation was scholarly, part of UNESCO's programme for the
preservation and revitalisation of 'intangible musical heritage'. This tendency towards
academe becomes even more marked with the LPs released by Sakata and Slobin,
which are field recordings made for their doctoral research. These Afghan music LPs
were compilations, drawing together a number of different genres to give an overall
view of the particular musical culture as a whole and with very little attention paid to
individual artists. In the Delapraz and Lubtchansky recordings, the names of the

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82 /. Baily
Figure 3 LP covers from the (a) UNESCO and (b) Mus?e de PHomme series, aimed at
Western buyers.

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musicians were not even mentioned although names of genres and locations where
the recordings were made are given.
These Afghan LPs have to be seen in the context of many other recordings of non
Western music issued in the 1960s and 1970s. The term 'world music' was not yet
being used as a commercial label; that started after 1987 (Sweeney 1991, ix). The
focus was on generic music cultures rather than on individual artists. It is not
surprising that these records had little impact in Afghanistan. They were not made for
local markets, where in any case LP playback equipment was not readily available.
Certain things changed with the advent of CD technology in the mid-1980s. Some of
the recordings originally released on LP were later re-released in the new format,
often under licence to another company. The civil war that began with the
Communist Revolution of 1978 meant that very little ethnomusicological research
was carried out in Afghanistan, even up to today. In 1993 the Archives Internationales
de Musique Populaire in Geneva published Afghanistan: Le rub?b de Herat, using my
field recordings made in 1974 of rubab virtuoso Mohammad Rahim Khushnawaz. On
the basis of this recording, Rahim Khushnawaz and two other Herati musicians, dutar
player Gada Mohammad and tabla player Azim Hassanpur, were invited to Paris for a
concert in the prestigious Th??tre de la Ville. While in Paris the trio recorded a CD of
instrumental music for Radio France s OCORA label, entitled Afghanistan: Rub?b et
Dutar, in 1994. Jan van Belle was able to visit Mazar-e Sharif in 1996 and made some
field recordings, published on the CD Shirin Dahani ('Sweet Lips') by Pan Records in
the Netherlands in 2001. He made another fieldtrip to northern Afghanistan in 2003,
the results of which were released by Pan on the CD Mehri Maftun: Music from
Afghan Badakhshan.
Now we see the start of Afghan musicians becoming part of the burgeoning world
music scene. Interest in the music of Afghanistan was boosted by the Al-Qaida attacks
on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban Government in
Kabul. Here was a country where apparently all forms of music involving musical
instruments were banned and upon which the West had waged an apparently
successful war. What could the music of such a country be like? In December 2001 the
BBC World Service organised the first concert for many years in Kabul, with Simon
Broughton (editor of Songlines magazine) as a member of the production team
overseeing its broadcast. He also directed the BBC4 documentary film Breaking the
Silence (Broughton 2002), which included vivid testimony as to the difficulties faced
by Afghans under Taliban rule with respect to music, with accounts of assassination
attempts, smashed instruments, radio singers forced to sing Taliban 'chants' on the
radio, and women posting lookouts while they celebrated clandestine wedding parties
with singing and frame drum playing.
In this context, one particular group of Afghan musicians based in Geneva
emerged to take a leading role in what was now becoming established as the 'world
music market'. Ensemble Kaboul was created by Hussein Arman and his son Khaled.

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84 /. Baily
Hussein Arman had been on the staff of the Vocational School of Music in Kabul, a
school teaching mainly Western music established by the Ministry of Education in
1974. His son Khaled Arman was given a scholarship to study guitar at the
Conservatory in Prague, and is fully trained in Western art music. He subsequently
became interested in the traditional music of his country and started to play the
rubab, to which he has made significant structural changes.16 Ensemble KabouFs first
CD was Nastaran ('Wild Rose') on Ethnomad Arion in 2001, produced under the
artistic direction of Dr Laurent Aubert, the well-known ethnomusicologist based in
Geneva. The group was a seven-piece ensemble, all from Afghanistan apart from
American santur and tambura player Paul Grant. The repertoire of the group
consisted mainly of songs from the 1960s performed in the Radio Kabul style.
Ensemble Kaboul toured extensively in Europe, adding occasional performances of
Indian and Iranian art music to their programme. The group was transformed by the
addition of the Afghan woman singer Farida Mahwash, one of the stars of Radio
Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, who had been living in California since the early
1990s, where she continued her singing career. She joined Ensemble Kaboul as its solo
vocalist in 2002, and their repertoire changed to include her well-known radio songs
that were in fact strongly Hindi film orientated. The recorded result was Mahwash,
Radio Kaboul: Hommage aux Compositeurs Afghans, released by Accords Crois?s in
2003. This was an innovative work that re-presented some of the famous songs from
the history of Radio Kabul in its heyday. The CD came with a substantial 31-page
booklet that gave a condensed history of Radio Kabul in French and English. The
position of Ensemble Kaboul as a world music star group was consolidated when
Mahwash received a BBC-Songlines Top of the World Music Award in 2003. Radio
Kaboul marked the apogee of Ensemble KabouPs success in the world music market.
Once Mahwash left the group to resume her career as a solo artist based in the United
States, Afghanistan largely disappeared from the world music scene. One of the most
obvious indicators of this declining interest is the absence of recordings of Afghan
music from the review section of Songlines over the past few years.
Conclusions
This paper has examined the different and separate worlds of Afghan music for
Afghanistanis and kharejis through looking at the history of recording Afghan music
on 78-rpm records, LPs, audio-cassettes and CDs since the 1920s. There are not many
examples of recordings that straddle both worlds. One such example is the live
recording of a concert given by rubab player Ustad Mohammad Omar and tabla
player Zakir Hussein at the University of Washington in 1974, when Mohamad Omar
was a Visiting Artist, an appointment arranged by his erstwhile student, ethnomu
sicologist Lorraine Sakata. Ustad Mohammad Omar was a star of Radio Afghanistan,
the most famous and revered rubab player in the country. Over the years Afghan
friends gave me several cassette copies of this concert, usually of very poor technical
quality. My guess is that when Ustad Mohammad Omar returned to Kabul after his

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stint as Visiting Artist at the University of Washington, he brought with him cassette
copies of his concert, which he gave to close friends. These were in turn copied and
re-copied, with progressive degradation in quality at each stage. The concert was
eventually released as Ustad Mohammad Omar: Virtuoso from Afghanistan by
Smithsonian Folkways in 2002, with an extensive booklet written by Lorraine Sakata.
Kabul Music House in Peshawar, Pakistan released a cheap pirated version of this
recording, in the usual thin cardboard cover.
There are two separate but interconnected questions to be answered: why do
kharejis not buy CDs made for the Afghan market, and why do Afghanistanis not buy
recordings made for the Western market? That Afghan producers of Afghan
recordings would like to sell recordings in the Western market is indicated by
Ahmad Hamidi's question posed at the start of this paper: 'How can we enter into the
international market, the world market, so that we can take a little share?' These
questions go beyond the realm of the music of Afghanistan and are relevant to wider
issues about the relationships between vernacular musics and their representations in
the West.
Most Afghans give priority to vocal music, and there are very few CDs of
instrumental music to be found in the Afghan groceries around the world. In a sense,
music is simply heard as one way of delivering poetic text. Is it the case that
Westerners prefer to listen to instrumental music rather than vocal music from other
parts of the world? It seems that the inability to understand lyrics in unknown
languages is not regarded as a problem in the world music market, and there seems to
be no prioritising of instrumental over vocal music when it comes to making new
recordings. The voice can be appreciated purely as a highly expressive musical
instrument.17
Yet an understanding of the lyrics, and of the deeper significance of the lyrics, is
important for the reception of song. This point is illustrated by one of the most
highly regarded CDs made for the Afghan market, by the singer Amir Jan Sabori,
originally from Herat. This CD, entitled Zendagie Harneen Ast ('This is Life'), has
been described by Abdul Wahab Madadi (see above) as 'a masterpiece' (shahkar).18
Western listeners might be struck by Amir Jan's voice, and by the very intricate and
subtle orchestration of the large ensemble of musicians from Tashkent (Uzbekistan),
but they cannot appreciate what this CD means to Afghan listeners. Amir Jan is a
poet as well as a singer and composer. His songs are full of sentiments about being in
exile and the present plight of people from Afghanistan, couched in a new kind of
poetry that relies very much on vernacular speech.
There are several other factors that might discourage the world music buff
from buying Afghan-produced CDs. Packaging of the product is one. Many
Afghan-produced CDs have only Farsi script on the front and back covers of the
jewel case and on the CD itself, with no roman lettering at all. How can the non
Afghan connect with the CD in textual terms? Not unrelated to this, Afghan
produced CDs have little or no information about what is on the record, in marked
contrast to some of the recordings made for the Western music market. This brings us

154.59.125.48 on Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:12:41 +00:00
86 /. Baily
to what is perhaps the crucial reason why Afghan music CDs made for Afghanistanis
do not sell to kharejis. Urban consumers from Afghanistan are much more interested
in the new modernised and Westernised forms of Afghan music, with strong
emphasis on electronic keyboard, than in traditional Afghan music using instruments
such as rubab, tanbur, dutar, sarinda, dhol and tabla. For them this represents
progress, modernity, being part of the contemporary world rather than stuck in a
quasi-medieval past, which is how encounters with Afghan culture have sometimes
been described. Only in the domain of Afghan art music is there a significant demand
by Afghanistanis for recordings from the past, as shown by the number of CDs of
Ustad Sarahang to be found in Afghan groceries; this could also explain the
continuing interest in the rubab playing of Ustad Mohammad Omar. But the new
Afghan pop music simply does not appeal musically to kharejis, who are looking for
something that seems authentic, even rough or raw, and for whom the timbres of
traditional instruments are aesthetically seductive. This can also explain the
disinterest of Afghanistanis in recordings made by Westerners. In part it is a question
of focus. Older recordings for the Western market, largely made by ethnomusicol
ogists, were usually compilations. While this is not unknown on recordings for the
Afghan market, interest is much more focused on individual artists. But more than
that, these recordings may represent an Afghan culture that Afghans themselves,
whether in Afghanistan or in the Afghan diaspora, are trying to move away from.
Acknowledgements
Much of this paper was written while I was a Visiting Fellow in the Monash Asia
Institute and School of Music?Conservatorium at Monash University, Melbourne.
The research reported here was supported by grants from the British Academy
(2000), the Committee for Central and Inner Asia (2002), the Arts and Humanities
Research Council Diasporas, the Migration and Identities Programme (2006) and the
Leverhulme Trust (2008-10). My thanks are due to Yama Yari, Veronica Doubleday,
Stephen Cottrell and Elizabeth Kinder for their comments and advice. I would also
like to thank the two anonymous readers who made extensive suggestions for the
improvement of the paper.
Notes
[1] The term Afghan is ambiguous. At one level it is synonymous with Pashtun, the name of the
largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, who speak Pashto; while at another level it refers to any
citizen of Afghanistan. Many non-Pashtuns from Afghanistan prefer the term Afghanistan^
in both noun and adjectival forms (see Bezhan 2008, 21). I have used this new term in my
title to signal my awareness of the issue, but continue to use the term Afghan for
convenience. The word khareji means 'foreigner'. Living amongst Afghans in the United
States and Australia I observed that non-Afghan American and Australian citizens were often
referred to as kharejis by Afghans.
[2] For a summary of earlier research on music and migration by Adelaida Reyes (1999) and
others, see Baily and Collyer 2006.

154.59.125.48 on Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:12:41 +00:00
[3] I obtained a photocopy of this catalogue from the EMI Archives in Hayes, London, in 1993.
The archive did not hold any of the records listed. Some of them have been re-released in CD
format by Watan Music in the United States.
[4] The musical significance of these communities is discussed by McNeil (2004, 11-38).
[5] The new radio station was linked to a more powerful transmitter, which gave Afghan radio
an international reach to neighbouring countries. In this way it was transformed from Radio
Kabul to Radio Afghanistan. In the late 1970s, when television broadcasting began from
Kabul, the organisation was renamed Afghan Radio and Television (RTA).
[6] A sequence showing Salaam Logari playing at a Spring country fair can be found in the film
The Annual Cycle of Music in Herat (Baily 1982).
[7] I have borrowed the useful term 'cassette culture' from Peter Manuel (1993).
[8] See Financial Times Weekend Supplement, 14/15 February 2009, p. 32.
[9] Taraki was the first of four Presidents of Afghanistan from the leftist People's Democratic
Party of Afghanistan. The fourth, Dr Najibullah, lost power to the new Coalition of
Mujahideen parties in 1992 and was lynched by a mob when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996
(Misdaq 2006, 185).
[10] Shah Wali Khan can be found singing in my film Amir: An Afghan Refugee Musicians Life in
Peshawar, Pakistan (Baily 1985).
[11] The film Scenes of Afghan Music. London, Kabul, Hamburg, Dublin has a conversation with a
cassette/CD shop proprietor who explains how he used to sell music cassettes secretly and
was twice apprehended and imprisoned in the notorious Pul-e Charki Prison. He adds that
he still has a stock of Taliban cassettes but they are stored at home, no doubt ready to be
brought back to the shop should the need arise. This scene also provides a good
representation of a typical music shop in Kabul in 2006.
[12] An interview with Eshpari is included in the film Tablas and Drum Machines (Baily 2005b).
[13] In 2006 I found only one such store in London, Sure Bazaar in West Ealing, but it changed
hands in the middle of the year and the new (Afghan) proprietors stopped selling CDs. In
London most CDs would seem to be sold at concerts, where it is common for a trader to set
up a stall at the back of the hall.
[14] The Kayhan Music shop and studio can be seen in Scenes of Afghan Music (Baily 2007).
[15] I am grateful to Daniel O'Donnell for providing information about these early Western
recordings of Afghan music.
[16] Khaled Arman had a luthier add extra frets all the way up the neck to make it more like the
guitar, added an extra bass string, and altered the bridge to make it more like that of the
Indian sarod.
[17] Perchard (2006) gives an exemplary account of appreciating the singing of Umm Kalthum
while having no knowledge of Arabic, the language in which she sings.
[18] Madadi makes this comment in the film Scenes of Afghan Music (Baily 2007).
[19] Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for all images included in this
article. If readers consider materials to be their copyright and have not been contacted by the
author please contact j.baily.gold.ac.uk
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Two Different Worlds - Afghan Music For Afghanis and Khariji

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