Daily Times

It is not every day that you hear about a new music genre being launched with a bit of a fan fair and that too in Australia. Ballina will become the first city in the world to host a world/pop event on October 28. Genre ambassador Mahmood Khan is known for his number one Aria Charting song “Like the River” which was recorded live at the Sydney Opera House, his number one Billboard album recorded with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra, and his string of several charting songs on iTunes US projecting him as the most Internationally Charting Australian Artist of All Time.

“I am really humbled that I have been given this opportunity. I feel like my years of work have paid off. Now I get to directly interact and musically communicate with an intimate audience and share an experience in this beautiful part of the world that resembles strikingly the Northern California region, the Sausalito area which was also the birth of the Jerry Garcia following,” he says.

“My job is to plant a new sound sort of like Paul Simon meets the Eagles with some Brazilian rhythms, a bit of the grateful dead, some Tom Petty and ELO and those blue grass tones with a whole lot of the feel-good vibe of Black America fused in with my Pakistani heritage plus the Mexican overtones I was exposed to in Los Angeles is what it will sound like. Then to create an audience around that sound from scratch and shoot a documentary about the experience is quite fascinating really.”

Renowned Australian music artist Mahmood Khan has followed the success of his last EP ‘Under the Stars,’ which contained Innocence, an international hit that shot into the US iTunes Top 15 chart, with Blue Snow. The new release is a stripped back contemporary folk-pop song featuring all the elements fans of Mahmood Khan will recognise-the evocative vocal performance, the well-formed melodic lines and structures, and the perceptive, spiritually attuned lyric explorations. What sets Blue Snow apart from some of Mahmood’s other musical voyages is perhaps its combination of fragility and sagacious resolve. When Mahmood intonates, “It’s going to happen eventually it’s just a matter of time / It’s our want and need / nothing can make us change our mind’, the breadth and depth of his certainty are as calming as the lullaby-like charm of the music’s gentle cadences. Adding to this is a particularly prominent bass guitar part, which acts not only as a driving yet subtle rhythmic pulse but echoes yet another dimension of the track; its sense of a beatific dream-like state, with the added function of the visual ‘blue snow’ doing the work of a symbolic and metaphorical nature. Mahmood’s vocal performance is another point of difference. Despite maintaining his typically impassioned style, Blue Snow’s melodic formation and decisive lyric allow him to communicate the song’s overarching sentiment in a more relaxed, essential manner, as though it were being transmitted to us at the very moment of its conception. It has a delicate urgency that, when interwoven with the acoustic guitar, keyboards, bass, and other sound textures, becomes a tribute to open-mindedness; its fluid, self-contained observations, such as ‘People like you are made to grow a little stronger’, working at a personal and universal level. Blue Snow isn’t as much about soul-searching as it is about soul-discovery, a disclosure of love, but a deliberation that reveals an otherworldly enlightened form such earthly affirmations initiate for those willing to accept and recognise it.

ARIA End of Decade Australian Singles Chart features notable and familiar names including Gotye, Vance Joy, Sheppard, 5 Seconds of Summer and Guy Sebastian and his focus is definitely on sales numbers and the sustained power of artist profile, sales ability and song in particular, but there’s still a whole sub-stratum of musical artists less well-known who have had an impact on the charts, both in Australia and globally, but who are rarely recognized or duly cited. One of these artists is the famous Australian musician of Pakistani origin Mahmood Khan.

Mahmood has not only defied the odds and expectations to achieve a level of sustained success unmatched in the music business, including the world’s most lucrative music market – the United States, but the multi-talented musician based in Sydney has now been officially recognised as one of the most charted Australian artists of all time.

Of course, Khan is no stranger to chart impact, as his CV reveals, paving the way for a music career that includes his enduring recordings with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, reaching the top five of the USA iTunes Jazz charts and having no fewer than six songs in the iTunes USA top 100 as of April 2021, with his No. 1 hit Billboard Classical Crossover Mahmood Khan with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra. But the past two years have been even busier for Khan. In May 2021, his jazz-inspired album, Imaginary friend topped US iTunes charts and track Jahan Tu Nahin rose to number 18 on the Billboard World Music Charts.

Not only does his story reveal an astonishing breadth and depth of experience and accomplishment, but his entrepreneurial savvy also positions him as a highly inventive and resourceful singular artist with an observant and intuitive eye for the future of music production and accessibility. Mahmood’s most recent chart success is Wings, his tribute to fellow musical legend Dan Warner. But Mahmood is such a prolific artist that his chart-impacting history is constantly being rewritten, and with the nature of charts and record releases that identify the music industry today, it’s a history that is updated almost in real time.

For example, this week, two older tracks in Mahmood’s music catalogue, Jagamarra and Sydney, are in the top 10 classic charts of iTunes USA. It’s not only an amazing feat for any Australian musical artist, but it’s even more impressive considering that Mahmood is generally known for writing compelling and poignant world pop songs. Not only do his releases touch multiple territories, but they also span a mix of genres. Listing all the songs that propelled Mahmood’s name into the history books would take up a lot of space, but naming a few would reveal the true scope of this indelible musician’s accomplishments.

These included, blue snow, Innocence, The battle is up, Imaginary friend, Small bed, Chel Drup EP, Jahan you nahi and Imaginary friend EP. There are certain periods when Mahmood had several charting tracks, including April this year with six songs, including Ginnon, One line down, merry-go-round, merry-go-round, Tere oper chaon, jagay dinner appearing in the top 10.

There are also albums that went to number one, including Mahmood’s work with the Willoughby Symphony and his album Tere Baghair, landing an incredibly coveted No. 1 spot on the iTunes USA chart. There are also record impacts, including ginoo becoming the first Urdu song in history to crack the Billboard charts and merry-go-round chart with two different releases on the commercial and independent charts.

Mahmood Khan may not have the profile of some of Australia’s most successful artists, but his name will forever be synonymous with Australian music history, the silent chart maker who will no doubt go on to create songs that resonate with audiences here and around the world.

One of the most significant and awarded world music artists of today, Mahmood Khan, is set to rewrite the history books again with a one-off, exclusive live performance in Ballina in the heart of the Northern Rivers region of NSW on the 28th of October at Resonator Music.

When Mahmood was granted citizenship by the Australian government in recognition of his contribution to the music industry, following the astounding success of Mahmood’s number one ARIA charting song, Like the River, recorded live at Sydney Opera House it helped transform his career.

More successes followed, with Mahmood acknowledged as the first Asian-born artist to top the Billboard charts in the Classical genre with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra, the only Asian artist to record a live album at the Sydney Opera House and declared a National Asset and Pride of Pakistan in 2020.

But his musical virtuosity has also had a global impact, attaining number one status on iTunes in France, the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico, Turkey, and Switzerland. The path to Mahmood’s incredible success began when he first heard the Bee Gees, whose sound and songs made an indelible impression on him. In 1985 he moved to Los Angeles and found work as a sound engineer at Jam Power Productions. The production company primarily focussed on R&B, jazz, Funk, and hip-hop genres, going on to score some of the biggest hits of the 1990s, including Coolio’s Gangster’s Paradise which was recorded at Echo Sound studios in Los Angeles.

Mahmood served at Jam Power for the next twelve years, citing his production assistant and engineering work as a crucial steppingstone and career highlight. He worked at the same studio’s Tom Petty, Kenny Rogers, Richard Marx, Quincy Jones, Keith Olsen, Ray Parker Jr, George Tobin, Gary Grant and Chuckii Booker among many others, regularly recorded. For almost two decades, Mahmood was surrounded by some of the greatest contemporary music makers in the world. Their knowledge and expertise obviously rubbed off, initiating a sustained period of creative growth and productivity.

Now Mahmood is ready to reveal another side to his remarkable vision–a live performance like no other, a true behind-the-scenes experience of the fruiting of Australia’s new music genre taking off in the Northern Rivers.

The audience will not only be exposed to a new genre in the making named ‘World/pop’–is defined as a fusion of World sensibilities with American Funk influences blended with a taste of South American rhythm, touched with Bluegrass and Country feels with pop-sounding melodies–but treated to a first-hand look at all the magic and mechanics of filming a musical event, with the show being taped for a special television presentation. The performance will also include the opportunity to interact and engage with Mahmood and his six-piece band.

Playing songs that span the breadth of his career, including the hits Ginoo, Agar, Merry Go Round, One Line Down and Blue Snow–which has just rocketed into the US iTunes Top Ten–the landmark event promises to be uplifting and rejuvenating as Mahmood leads audiences into a dive into the deep musical culture of specialness and peace.

The forthcoming show is thirty-five years in the making, highlighting Australia’s diversity and shining the spotlight on one of the most notable song-writing and production enigmas of the Australian music scene, Mahmood Khan.