We might not have known there was a World Music Day, but we weren’t surprised. And who better than the purveyors of the most progressive music on the airwaves to help us celebrate in style?

With a name that resembled what they were looking for in Iraq, the station organised concerts in all the three metropolitan cities, and though they might not have invited big name bands, they did showcase a lot of emerging talent and folks who just plain well like to rock out — Sketches, ICU, Spoonful with Sarah Haider, the kids from the Children Academy of Performing Arts and a whole load of other bands brought together young and old to sing everything from Delhi Belly’s Bhaag DK Bose to a Gavin DeGraw’s I Don’t Want To Be.

Capping the night in Karachi was Nadir Siddiqui from Spoonful deciding to go nuts on stage while a surprise performance from Ali Gul Pir had everyone roaring in applause.

Soundbyte

When I asked Sarah Haider to describe what it felt like to perform at the World Music Day, she originally started off with the usual “diversity, energy” talk. I asked her to describe it one word and she invented the word, ‘shabang’. When I asked the lead singer of the band that RJ Khalid Malik introduced as ‘the boys from Jamshoro’ to describe the concert festival in one word, he said “Ishq”. There was no shortage of loonies at the WMD and it was all the better for it.