Beginnings
Zaki started playing music at the age of thirteen and has still stuck to his guns. His obsessive nature has ensured a constant flux of music from him, though both hell and high water have come his way. The story began when his grandfather started playing some ethnic string instrument, left home and disappeared for good. Though Zaki is traceable, he tends to meander like some mad man in the music that plays incessantly in his head. It has to be genetic inheritance. Zaki's travails into cascades and cadences had somewhat of a rocky start. His father initially got him a drum kit that was deemed too loud. A saxophone took its place, but the trumpeting was too much for the family to handle. Finally a compromise was struck on the guitar and that suited everyone just fine, especially Aamir who immediately started working out melodies on one string. Soon he had learnt the ropes by instinct, playing the music others made before him.
Playing alone soon got boring for young Zaki, so he started jammin' with a friend who played the drums. The drummer is now a cab driver in New York. However, the short time that they played together was enough for Zaki to start a band called Drug Enforcement. In 1984, they played their first show at Rangoonwala Hall where they scandalized the audience by doing covers of The Who, Cream and Jimi Hendrix. The line up consisted of Salman Habib on drums, who eventually gave up drumming for Habib Oil Mills, and Abbas Premjee, who went on to the States to study, amongst other things, classical guitar. Apparently, Premjee still plays a mean flamenco, but can he match his counterpart who followed his heart?
Read more about this topic: Aamir Zaki
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“The beginnings of altruism can be seen in children as early as the age of two. How then can we be so concerned that they count by the age of three, read by four, and walk with their hands across the overhead parallel bars by five, and not be concerned that they act with kindness to others?”
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“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
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