Nayyara
Noor’s name translated into ‘a radiant star of light’. On 20th
August, the star of her life on earth was extinguished after a battle with
cancer. As with Shaukat Ali last year, Nayyara Noor’s death is something of a
personal tragedy for me, because of the inextricable link between her voice and
my formative years. Her voice was my initiation into the world of ghazal and
nazm, my introduction to the poetry of Faiz, Nasir Kazmi and many others, my
key to exploring music from my grandparents and great-grandparents generation,
and an early introduction to the work of the golden generation of Pakistani TV
composers.
Nayyara
Noor, one of five children, was born in Guwahati, Assam in 1950 to a family
originally from Amritsar. While she migrated with most of her family to Karachi
when she was seven years old; her father stayed on for another 35 years. The
second decade of her life was spent in Karachi and later Lahore, where she was
discovered while singing in a musical evening in the National College of Arts.
Prof Asrar Ahmed of Islamia College Lahore was the first to encourage her to
sing, composing several pieces for her in her initial years as a singer. In the
early 1970s, Shoaib Hashmi, along with his wife Saleema, Farooq Qaiser, Shahid
Ttosy and Arshad Mehmood created a number of highly influential sketch shows
for PTV, including Such Gup and Tal Matol. Every week, the sketches would be
interspersed with one or two songs by young Nayyara, sitting as if lost in a
reverie, singing to herself, oblivious to the camera’s attention. Her singing
style was completely different from the reigning queens of Pakistani music, including
Iqbal Bano, Farida Khanum and Noorjehan. Completely devoid pf the ‘nakhray’ and
the ‘nritya’ of her contemporaries, she sang in a simple, almost matter-of-fact
way, letting the sweetness and beauty of her voice shine through.
In
1976, in celebration of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s 65th birthday, Shoaib Hashmi,
along with his Tal Matol team collaborated with EMI Pakistan to release a
seminal album, “Nayyara Sings Faiz”. From its first track, ‘Intesaab’ (Preamble) to
the concluding piece ‘Khair
Ho Teri Leylaon Ki’, each track presented a fresh, distinct interpretation
of Faiz. The album liner
notes
highlight the youth and freshness of the contributors, as well as Faiz’s
personal involvement with the project. Nayyara herself considered this project,
and her association with Faiz as one of the fondest and most affecting memories
of her life. This album, initially released as an LP and later on cassette and
CD, was the gateway to Faiz, and to the beauty of Urdu poetry, for me and many listeners
of the preceding generation. The sweetness and malleability
of her voice was perfectly suited to Faiz’s nazms and geets, as a result,
tracks from the album are now considered some of the finest interpretations of
Faiz ever recorded. In probably her finest achievement as a singer, as with Noorjehan and ‘Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat’, Mehdi
Hassan with ‘Gulon Main Rang Bharay’, and Iqbal Bano with ‘Dasht-e-Tanhai’,
Nayyara Noor was able to make a Faiz nazm synonymous with her name, ‘Aaj Bazar Main’. The “Nayyara
Sings Faiz” cassette tape was in such heavy rotation in my home growing up that
it had to be replaced at least three or four times because of wear and tear.
Another
one of Nayyara Noor’s cassettes proved an important gateway for me. Ever since
I could remember, I had been obsessed with music from the golden era of Hindi
films, yet was totally unaware of the wealth of music released before
partition. Nayyara and her husband had released a cassette of covers of 1930’s
and ‘40s film songs titled ‘Yaadon Ke Saaye’ in 1988, and I happened
upon it in my parents’ cassette collection in almost 10 years later, when I was
eleven. Violinist Javed Iqbal’s wonderful arrangements and Nayyara’s wonderful
singing ensured that these 50-year-old melodies sounded fresh
to my ears, and propelled me towards discovering the wonderful music of the pre-partition
era, which enamors me to this day. The story goes that when the great Anil
Biswas heard Nayyara’s rendition
of one of his 194s hits, he exclaimed “I wish she had been around when I
composed the song in the forties. I would have happily used her as a playback
singer.” He autographed the cassette flap of the album for her, an autograph
which she considered her most prized possession and which she framed and displayed
in her house.
One of the mainstays of the Pakistani music industry has been the TV drama series OST. In the heyday of the Pakistan Television, from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, PTV collaborated with EMI Pakistan to release a series of albums titled TV Hits, featuring OSTs as well as hit songs from PTV’s musical programs. Featuring compositions by some of Pakistan’s leading composers, including Khalil Ahmed, Mian Sheheryar and Arshad Mehmud, Nayyara Noor’s prolific PTV output yielded not one but two highly acclaimed ‘TV Hits’ albums, featuring some of her greatest hits. Even these albums didn’t do full justice to her work on PTV. Her haunting, melancholy-tinged ‘Kabhi Hum Khoobsurat Thay’ from Shehzad Khalil and Rahat Kazmi’s 1980 play ‘Teesra Kinara’ (an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead) is one of her most enduring hits. The crowning glory of 1980’s Pakistani Drama, ‘Dhoop Kinarey’ also featured Nayyara Noor singing the title track, an astonishing Arshad Mehmud composition with lyrics by Hasan Akbar Kamal.
