The Night of Pop: a Pritom Hasan exclusive
The Business Standard spoke with the pop sensation Pritom Hasan regarding his first headliner ‘The Night of Pritom Hasan’ on 26 October. The star also shared details about his eight-year long musical career
If you visualise Dhaka concert go-ers jumping up and down to loud music at a concert, your first guess would be that a rock band was in town. That won't be an incorrect assumption for it's true that bands and rock musicians make the loudest noise. However, what's also true is that no one Pritom Hasan has also been making a lot of noise in the pop scene.
A testament to the last sentence would be the concert celebrating his near-decade-long musical career, entitled 'The Night of Pritom Hasan' on 26 October at the International Convention Centre Bashundhara (ICCB).
The Business Standard caught up with Pritom Hasan after the show where the musician spoke at length about the evolution and the challenges in the current pop scene, his latest album, upcoming projects and lastly, the nuances of pulling off and advertising a pop concert by walking us through the nitty gritty of his own first headliner.
"For me, I want to out-do what I did the previous year," began Pritom when asked if the current year has actually been the most conducive for him as an artist.
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Pritom, earlier in the year released 'Shorgohara' – a six track album. However, Pritom created the album in a rather "depressing state of mind."
"I was experimenting with synth-wave sounds during the pandemic and that is when I first landed upon Morey Jak. But apart from Morey Jak, the experiments which had 'failed' in my opinion, were the tracks with which we made Shorgohara," he said.
The response from the audience upon the release of the album was tremendous. Apart from Morey Jak, the other track which fared really well with listeners was Pritom's duet with Masha Islam on 'Paliye Jabo.' They are planning to release a music video of the song in the near future.
"Most of the songs on the record were not initially approved by me. But despite that, Shorgohara is by far one of my favourite albums, Shesh Upohar is one of my favourites from the album," he added.
It's true pop concerts aren't as frequent as rock concerts. But in the recent past, pop musicians have proved their mettle.
Quite recently – during the Anuv Jain concert – Pritom, Tahsan Khan and Xefer were scheduled to deliver opening acts before Jain was supposed to take the proverbial and literal limelight away.
But Anuv couldn't take the spotlight away from the Bangladeshi Pop stars. However, we prefer to look at it like this: our brilliant local popstars outshone their international counterpart.
"If you think about it, opening for them can also be a good ground for pop musicians because people can experience how powerful our performances can truly be. We sent a message that we can turn the tables if we try hard enough and are united. Opening for other musicians is not an issue but that doesn't mean we will be opening for them everytime," he said.
Moving on, we discussed Pritom's first show between rehearsals. He disclosed the nuances of designing a live pop show.
"We want to amplify the live experience. We won't introduce guest performers prior to taking the stage; they'll just appear on stage out of the blue and make the audience go wild," he said.
Prior announcements do kill the suspense and so, Pritom's plan worked perfectly during the show.
Pritom also informed us that they will be playing the studio samples as live backing tracks during the sets. Why not create all of the atmosphere live on stage organically?
"These songs have a certain energy to them, the audience will never have fun or fully relate if we can't deliver the same energy on stage and we try blending all of these together," he replied.
Pritom and his band of instrumentalists designed and composed extended versions of his songs for the show. They re-mixed most of the tracks as mashups of your favourite pop songs. For Pritom, sharing the stage and mixing his own tracks with iconic compositions of a few stalwarts of Bangladeshi music was also his way of paying homage to them.
"While working on the mixes, it dawned upon us that some of the elements of my songs blend really well with others. We mixed Habib bhai's Krishno. Some of its elements went well with my song Khoka. Similarly, Morey Jak was mixed with Rafa's Ami Akash Pathabo and that sounded great," he said.
The Night of Pritom Hasan
The plethora of stars present as guest performers pulled in their own crowd as well but over the four thousand present that night knew couldn't stop singing along to Pritom's songs in unison.
From the crowd revelling in Momtaz's 'Local Bus', to jumping up and down to Rafa's 'Ami Akash Pathabo', to going berserk at seeing Xefer dancing to 'Jhumka' and flashing their phone lights to Habib's rendition of 'Din Gelo', everyone had a night of their lives.
Habib Wahid in particular, seemed to be the biggest guest attraction of the night.
Habib opened with a few lines from 'Beni Khuley', and followed it up with 'Krishno' before mesmerising everyone with 'Din Gelo'. The crowd really enjoyed Habib's father, the legendary singer Ferdous Wahid's stint as well when he sang the famous lyrics 'Gozamil Gozamil'.
"The show exceeded all my expectations. It was an absolute blast! Around 4,500 people stayed so disciplined and organised! As a musician, I am very very happy," Pritom concluded happily.
