A new cultural events management company wants to bring high quality, sophisticated and classical based performing art for discerning audiences in New Zealand.
Music4Dreamz arrived with a bang on the Auckland Indian cultural scene with its extraordinarily successful maiden venture last month. The group’s first effort that brought tabla maestro Fazal Qureishi and Australia based sarod artiste Adrian McNeil to Auclland audiences at the Avondale College auditorium surpassed all expectations when the performance turned out to be a total sell out.
The capacity crowd that packed the venue was well beyond what the organisers had expected with over 650 people attending against an original estimate of just about 400.
“Being our inaugural offering we were definitely nervous,” says Music4Dreamz’s Prashant Tijore. “Even more so because it was culturally a busy weekend being the last day of the Navratri festival, other fairly high profile cultural engagements on the same day and last but not the least, it was the first day of daylight saving where people had to adjust their schedules to the new time.”
Music4Dreamz began as collaborative effort between four friends who shared a deep interest in quality Indian performing art, which they have now developed into an enterprise involved in bringing good performers together for audiences in New Zealand.
Prashant, who first mooted the idea of turning their interest into an enterprise, is a financial adviser with a keen interest in music and is himself a singer who has participated in several shown around New Zealand.
Siddharth Sharma is an IT professional and restaurateur who is also a keen disc jockey and has wide experience in event logistics. Rohitesh Prasad is a hobby musician and a busy aeronautical engineer and businessman Rakesh Nanda, formerly an engineer with the Indian Navy and now based in Brisbane, completes the quartet.
With so many event organisers who put up shows with Indian flavour every year across New Zealand, why did Music4Dreamz want to join the race?
“Many events that organisers bring here from India seem pretty much the same. It’s the same Bollywood song and dance routines with a few famous names thrown in,” says Prashant. “There is a much wider choice of performers and performances out there and we thought we’d concentrate on bringing those for our audiences here.”
“Everyone knows the calibre of someone like Fazal and when we learned that he was coming to New Zealand to conduct a series of workshops for the University of Auckland, we jumped on the opportunity to take his amazing percussion music to wider audiences,” says Siddharth.
A little coordination between like-minded people, some good, well thought out media promotions and a lot of networking is what made the whole thing come together,” says Prashant. The team is obviously pleased with the outcome of their first venture and feels encouraged enough to look at their next events.
The group is considering bringing new concepts of entertaining performing art based on both classical and avant garde genres. “Indian-western music fusion concerts is something that we are definitely looking at,” says Prashant. “We know there is high interest and if we can build it around a good concept, there is every reason that it would turn out to be novel,” adds Siddharth.
There is a host of young Indian artistes based across the world that are continually experimenting with musicians of other countries and styles to produce interesting sounds and rhythms. The fact that these new genres are taking off is evident from the popularity of albums and track downloads. “It would be fantastic to get such artistes to perform live,” says Prashant.
Meanwhile, as the four plan out their strategies for next year, tabla maestro Fazal was so pleased with their organisation last month that he has agreed to come to New Zealand again for concerts with novel concepts next year.
It would be interesting to wait and see what Music4Dreamz dreams up next.