Fareed Haque: Fareed Haque Group -Garaj Mahal

Faree Haque considers himself a musical linguist

By Alexander Varty
Publish Date: 25-May-2006
For someone who’s had only three hours’ sleep—he got in from a Cincinnati gig at 7 a.m., then got up at 10 for a train-museum date with his young son—Fareed Haque is uncommonly articulate. Perhaps it’s stress.

“I’m finishing a guitar concerto right now,” says the Pakistani-American guitarist and composer, calling from his home in Dekalb, Illinois. “The score has to be done in the next few hours, so the copyist can get the parts ready for rehearsal on Tuesday.”

It’s Haque’s second full-length orchestral commission, but only one small part of his diverse musical interests. When he’s not puzzling out how to write string charts on the computer, he’s either teaching at Northern Illinois University; establishing a reputation as a top interpreter of baroque and early-classical music for the guitar; performing with his jazz-singer wife, Elizabeth Conant; running his House Café venue; or touring the jam-band circuit as part of the Indo-fusion act Garaj Mahal.

With all of this action going on, how does he tell his projects apart?

“Well, that aspect of it has always been rather natural, I think, perhaps because I speak a lot of languages and am sort of a linguist,” he explains. “I mean, when I play [early 19th-century composer] Mauro Giuliani, for instance, I don’t just spend a lot of time perfecting one piece. Instead, I’ll go and very quickly Xerox a copy of five cadenzas and learn them all, and then mix and match the licks just like I’d do for a bebop solo. It’s like learning a language: it doesn’t take that long for your mind to go, ‘Oh, yeah, these are the essential little tricks.’ And I make a point of learning how to improvise in all of these styles, at least in a rudi?mentary fashion. That gives me an arsenal on which to draw.”

The band that he’s bringing to Vancouver this week features another aspect of Fareed Haque: instrument designer. He’ll be playing a unique sitar-guitar that incorporates the best of North Indian and North American luthiery. It’s the perfect tool on which to perform his increasingly multicultural music.

“As part of my ongoing interest in modern music, I’ve been exploring the relationship between jazz and Pakistani folk music,” he notes. “That’s the music I grew up with, and it swings in a way that Indian classical music, in general, does not. We have this impression of Indian music being this very staid, meditative thing, but those people can really party.”