Qasim Naqvi is a Pakistani-American composer and drummer. Aside from founding the band Dawn of Midi with his friends, Naqvi’s work has been commissioned by The BBC Concert Orchestra, Jennifer Koh, The London Contemporary Orchestra, The Helsinki Chamber Choir, Alexander Whitley, Cikada, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and others. His soundtracks have also appeared on HBO, NBC, PBS, Showtime, New York Times Op-Docs, and VICE Media.
Hayat Life Managing Editor Maha Qadri asked Naqvi about his solo and collaborative music career.
Naqvi talks about his beginnings in music and how his skills have grown over the years.
Qadri: What was the moment you decided to pursue music? When did you start playing the drums?
Naqvi: I started getting into music seriously around the age of 12. I was walking through the halls of my middle school and heard the most incredible drumming coming from the band room. When I peered through the glass, a young woman in her early 20s was sitting behind a drum set. I was mesmerized, and I immediately introduced myself and signed up for her band class. She taught me the drums and was my mentor and friend during my high school days. She had such amazing musicality, and I learned so much from her.
I also have two older brothers who introduced me to jazz and experimental music at a very young age, and I fell in love with it. When you’re a young teenager, it’s difficult to be passionate about anything. So when I felt that draw towards drumming, it was a special paradigm shift in my life.
Qadri: I read that your album “Two Centuries” was dubbed among the best music of 2022 by the Washington Post. What did that recognition mean to you, especially with that album?
Naqvi: It was an album I made with producer Sun Chung and my two teachers/creative musical legends, Wadada Leo Smith and Andrew Cyrille. When the album came out, it didn’t get a whole lot of attention in the press, especially in America. While it’s important to believe in your vision despite the lack of attention it receives, it was a bit deflating. So when the Washington Post review came in, it was a nice way to end the year. The album also received the Deutsche Jazz Prize for Best International Instrumental Album. It was gratifying to finally receive some recognition for this project. It was something I poured my heart into during a particularly heavy moment — a pandemic and a country unraveling from police brutality and the murder of George Floyd.
Qadri: Your work covers several diverse genres. Do you have a favorite type of music? Which do you like to play versus compose?
Naqvi: I’ve always been interested in writing music. When I started playing drums, I was interested in expressing a deeper emotional palette through sound by writing music for groups and other people to interpret. For me, drumming, composing, and film scoring, which I started doing at around the age of 20, are all languages that have become a part of me. Over the years, their root structures have connected.
The newest thing for me is modular synthesis and electronic music. That’s something I started getting into in 2017, and I’m a little obsessed with it at the moment. It embodies performance and composition with the magic of spontaneous compositional choices, which I cherish in jazz and improvised music. It sort of hit all those buttons in my mind. It feels like a massive orchestra at my fingertips that’s reading my subconscious.
Naqvi and his friends went from improvising music sessions in school to opening for Radiohead.
Qadri: What was the process of founding Dawn of Midi?
Naqvi: We all met in school at the California Institute of the Arts. Before playing together, we started a late-night tennis league and got to know each other as friends for almost a year, just playing tennis and hanging out. It was a lark when Aakaash, the bassist, suggested that we should all play music together. We used to have these “dark sessions” late into the night. Some of the classrooms had no windows and were pitch black when the lights were off. Even when your eyes adjusted, it was total blackness — I couldn’t even see my drums. During these sessions, we would improvise, and it elevated our sense of listening . We played this way for almost a year and developed a special rapport and language. Later on, we abandoned all of that and began working on a new type of music which was completely worked out, with no improvisation whatsoever. It was rhythmic dialogue-based music, heavily inspired by Ghanaian Ewe drumming and North African musical traditions from Morocco. That gave rise to our album “Dysnomia.”
Qadri: I read that Dawn of Midi was chosen as Radiohead’s support band when they played Madison Square Garden for their “Moon Shaped Pool” tour. How did y’all come across the opportunity? Was there a lot of pressure playing with such an iconic band?
Naqvi: We played a show at a music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee called “Big Ears.” Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead was also there, and they were performing a bunch of his film music. I think he came to our show and really enjoyed it. A year or so went by, and we got an email from our booker with an invitation to open for Radiohead.
Jonny came and hung out with us in our greenroom and asked us all sorts of questions about our piece. Clive Deamer, the drummer of Portishead, was also playing with Radiohead, and he was such a nice guy. He sat through the entirety of our soundchecks out in the middle of the empty arena. He was really into the music. It was amazing to meet all of them. At the time, we had played “Dysnomia” so much, probably around 500 times, if not more. When we hit the stage, the lights and the glitz of it all washed away a bit. It was actually a very comfortable experience. The stage felt like a giant living room.
Naqvi recaps his busy 2023.
Qadri: I read that you’ll be opening for Anoushka Shankar soon. Do you have any other upcoming projects or performances you’re excited about?
Naqvi: I had a busy spring and summer, but things are winding down until the new year. I wrote a new piece for the BBC Concert Orchestra which premiered back in May and recently completed a chamber work for the Cello Octet of Amsterdam. I wrote a few evening-length works for a modular synthesizer which I was able to perform a lot over the summer. I’m hoping to record those by the end of the year.
I also scored a new feature documentary by my friend and long-time collaborator, Mariam Ghani, titled “Dis-Ease.” In her words, “‘Dis-Ease’ looks at how the metaphors we use to describe illnesses (and how some diseases become metaphors to describe other phenomena) affect how we treat people who are sick, determine whether and when we connect public health to climate change and urban planning, and lock us into militarized national security paradigms for both responding to current epidemic diseases and planning for future pandemics.” The score was heavily influenced by 50s, 60s, and 70s era sci-fi.
I also recorded a couple of albums over the summer on drums with some different groups. I’ve been playing drums for almost 35 years, and it activates a deep and old intuitive side of me.
