Living Legend, Baul Shah Abdul Karim

[jigSAW]

The year is 1915. Ujandhal, Dirai, Sunamganj. This is one of the remote village of Bangladesh, where Abdul Karim born. Growing up with poverty, he started expressing his thoughts and emotions from very early age. Ektara, an instrument of music being his medium to express his thoughts, villager’s heart melted with his melodic and soothing voice. With so many time devoted in singing, hardly he could make time to make his way to think about livelihood or any other job than entertaining people. But he was forced to earn living hardship by harvesting. But Music never left him even with so much obstacles and poverty. As the time goes by, and as he was maturing with age, he went on taking training of spiritual and baul music from Kamal Uddin, Shadhak Rashid Uddin, Shah Ibrahim Mastan Baksh. His versatility ranged from Baul song, Spiritual song to Bhatiali. He went on learning all the exclusive modules of Baul song afterwards along with Shariatti, Marfatti, Nabuot, Belayat, etc. the various devout form of music. He was motivated by philosophy of renowned Lalan Shah, Panju Shah and Duddu Shah. Throughout his life he has written and composed more than 1500 songs to date. Although, he performed on England on 1964 and 1985, not a single musical album has been released by this Soulful Singer. He has been out of limelight of fame and fortune. But his legendary songs remixed by various musical bands like Dolchhut, Bangla and Habib/ Kaya is very popular, such as “Gari Choley na”, “Maya Lagaise”, “Krishno”! These songs created huge audience popularity. Thus, very recently we could come to know about Baul Shah Abdu Karim. Most of the credits of these were remained as collected; none knew the man behind until very recent. He achieved “Amar Ekushey” award on 2001 and Bangla Academy published English translation of his 10 numbers of songs.

Very recently Sound Machine released an album honoring this living legend. Many renowned names such as Bangla, Dolchhut, Maqsud, Momtaj, Dilruba Khan were amongst others performed for this album free of cost, to show their respect and honor to legendary music initiator. Large number of audience now recognized the real tune of Bangladeshi Heritage through this album. Result, high demand on market for this album named “Living Legend Baul Shah Abdul Karim”. Baul Shah Abdul Karim is living in poverty and in his old age, he is suffering from various illnesses. Sound Machine declared to provide charity to this legendary singer and composer. Baul Shah Abdul Karim appreciated this album and urges to keep all his compositions integral. Let us all take a time listen the tunes of Baul Shah Abdul Karim by buying the original CD and in some way contribute to this noble cause.

album cover