LESSONS FROM GULAM: ASIAN MUSIC IN BRADFORD

Those who believe that making movies is simply a matter of pressing a video camera button and putting the shots together as they come may learn a lot through studying the booklet and analysing the film ... Besides taking Lessons from Gulam in performing qawwali music, one can take `Lessons from Baily' in how to structure a film. H. Zemp

52 minutes Colour 1986
Film-maker: John Baily

Bradford is a mill town in the north of England with a population of some 350,000 people of whom about 60,000 are Asians, predominantly Muslim Asians. Lessons from Gulam is a detailed study of musical enculturation and education within this Muslim community. Gulam Musa comes from Gujarat (India), and is a member of the Khalita group whose traditional caste occupations include those of barber and musician. In Bradford he is a music teacher and singer of qawwali, a form of Muslim devotional music found in India and Pakistan and also a genre of media-disseminated popular music. He runs an amateur qawwali group (called Saz aur Awaz, `Music and Song'), usually training his accompanists, and also takes part in Asian music workshops in the schools of Bradford. Lessons from Gulam explains several aspects of Asian music, especially drumming, and contrasts musical education in the school with what goes on in people's homes. It has long shots of musical performance, filmed and edited in the observational style, presented as the narrative of a visit to Bradford, and shows the film-maker getting his own lessons from Gulam.

The film-maker is an ethnomusicologist and his musical knowledge is revealed in the detail and attention paid to the specifics of this Indian music style. Such insight is rare in ethnographic films and makes this film particularly valuable for music teachers and for teachers at both the school and university level who wish to expose students to the multi-cultural elements of music in Britain today.

John Baily made this film at the National Film and Television School during his training as an ethnographic film-maker under the scheme organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the National Film and Television School and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. A study guide by John Baily gives a detailed account of the sequences in the film, of the people who appear in it, of the music that they play and of the way that the film was made. This booklet is available from the RAI Film Officer, price £2.00. Catalogue numbers, (16mm): RA174 £18; (VHS): RA/VHS174 £8.

J. Baily, 1988. `Music of Afghanistan: Professional Musicians in the City of Herat'. In J. Blacking (ed.) Cambridge Studies in Ethnomusicology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

J. Baily, 1990. The Making of Lessons from Gulam: Asian Music in Bradford. A Study Guide to the Film. Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

R. Ballard, 1988. `The Political Economy of Migration: Pakistan, Britain and the Middle East'. In J.S. Eades (ed.) Migrant Workers and the Labour Market. Tavistock, London.

P.D. Jones, 1984. An Investigation into Curriculum Music in Middle Schools and the Role of Music in the Lives of Muslim Children, as a Basis for Development of a Music Education more Relevant to a Multi-cultural Society. B.Ed. dissertation, Bradford College, UK.

M. Michaelson, 1984. Proceedings of a conference on Gujarati ethnicity in Britain. School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

D. Mull and J. Mull, 1989. Review of the film. American Anthropologist, Vol. 91, pp. 836-38.

V. Saifullah Khan, 1977. `The Pakistanis: Mirpuri Villagers at Home and in Bradford'. In J.L. Watson (ed.) Between Two Cultures. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

H.L. Sakata, 1983. Music in the Mind. Kent State University Press, Kent.

H. Zemp, 1988. Review of the film. Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 20, pp. 257-60.