Agha Bashir Ahmed Fareedi

Agha Bashir Ahmed Fareedi was the brother of Agha Rasheed Ahmed and Majeed Ahmad Fareedi, and a renowned Qawwal of the Rajpoot Kerala gharana. The eldest son of Mian Barkat Ali, and grandson of the legendary Mian Mehtab Din “Taba” Qawwal, Agha Basheer Ahmed was born in the village of Chitti, near Nakoder, in Jalandhar district. Groomed as a Qawwal from a very young age, Agha Bashir Ahmed learnt Qawwali from his grandfather and his uncles, before heading to Amritsar to learn classical music under Bhai Lal Muhammad of the Gwalior gharana. Along with classical music, he also learnt Qawwali from Fateh Ali Khan Qawwal. After several years of musical training, he set out on his own as the leader of a Qawwali Party at the beginning of the 1940s. Settling initially in Amritsar and later in Lahore after the partition of the subcontinent, Agha Bashir Ahmed was one of the most popular Qawwals of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He was affiliated with Radio Pakistan Lahore as a station director and spent the majority of his life performing for Radio and Television in Lahore. He was also one of the first artists whose music was released in the newly independent Pakistan by the recently established HMV Pakistan label. Agha Basheer Ahmed performed continuously for almost six decades, and made a mark on the Qawwali landscape with his powerful, deeply mellifluous voice. He was especially adept at the techniques of ‘taan-kaari’ and ‘taan-paltas’, allowing him to heighten the emotional impact of everything that he sang. With age, his voice lost some of the robustness of his earlier recordings, but the fragility and emotiveness of his voice lent an extra spiritual dimension to the mehfil recordings of his last two decades as a performer.