There is a particular kind of magic that happens when musicians sit together in a room — not on a stage, not in a studio, but simply together — and let the music find its own way. In the classical traditions of South Asia, this magic has a name: the baithak. Sometimes called a mehfil, or bazm, it is a gathering older than any concert hall, rooted in the idea that music is not a performance to be consumed, but a conversation to be shared.
Before the music is played at a baithak, there is food. There is tea. There is talk — about poetry, about life, about whatever is weighing on the heart that evening. The musicians and their guests sit together as equals, not divided by the invisible wall of a stage. Only once those threads of human connection are woven does the music begin. It is, in that sense, so much more than a jamming session. A jamming session produces sound. A baithak produces belonging.
This ancient tradition is quietly, stubbornly alive in the living rooms of London and Oxford, thanks to a small group of friends who refuse to let it die.
Once a month, Hassan Nouman, Isher, Ahsan, Adeel, Shams, and Saad find each other — sometimes in a London flat, sometimes in an Oxford common room — and recreate something that feels both timeless and urgently necessary. Isher and Adeel take their places behind the tabla, their fingers poised over drums whose conversation with melody is as old as the Mughal courts. Shams and Hasan settle behind harmoniums, those bellows-driven instruments that became the heartbeat of Hindustani classical and devotional music. And the rubab — the ancient plucked lute, sometimes called the lion of instruments — adds its distinctive voice to the weave.
But it is Hassan’s voice that leads. In the tradition of the baithak, the vocalist is the sun around which everything else orbits. The tabla marks the time, the harmonium fills the harmonic ground, the rubab adds colour and counterpoint — but all of it exists to carry the singer’s expression further, deeper, higher. When Hasan sings, the instruments do not merely accompany him; they listen to him, respond to him, breathe with him.
What makes their gatherings remarkable is what they deliberately leave out: a set list. A fixed programme. A plan. “We go with the vibes,” as Hassan puts it. The evening unfolds depending on what they are feeling — which ghazal is calling to them, which raga suits the mood, which verse of poetry someone cannot get out of their head. They talk about poetry between pieces. They sing it. They let one song dissolve into another with no announcement, because in a true baithak, the music is alive and it knows where it wants to go.
This is precisely what the modern music industry cannot replicate. The era of streaming and stadium concerts has given us music everywhere, yet what is lacking is the intimacy. We have playlists for every mood but fewer and fewer moments when music genuinely happens — unrecorded, unpolished, unrepeatable. The baithak was always the antidote to spectacle. It was music at human scale.
That this tradition is diminishing is not surprising. It requires time, proximity, shared cultural memory, and a willingness to sit with each other in the beautiful uncertainty of an unplanned evening. These are not things our age makes easy.
Which is why what this group of friends does each month — gathering over tea, lifting their instruments, and following the music wherever it leads — is not just a hobby. It is an act of preservation. Maybe of resistance, even. A quiet insistence that some things are worth keeping: the warm room, the shared silence before the first note, the ancient conversation between a singer and the instruments that love him.
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