ehfil Tour opened its Karachi chapter at the Arts Council of Pakistan on May 8, turning the venue into a meeting point for multiple musical worlds. Curated by producer Zulfiqar Jabbar Khan, better known as Xulfi, alongside Sherry Khattak, the concert brought the sounds of Hunza into conversation with the songs we’ve all grown up singing. It was an evening where nostalgia met something brand new, reminding us all of the quiet magic that happens when a song simply feels like home.

Music has a way of doing what no other art can: it somehow freezes time while keeping us moving. A simple melody can hold an entire childhood, the sting of a loss or the feeling of a city at sunset. When that same song is passed on to new voices or shared in a new place, it doesn’t lose that history, it just grows deeper. That tension between memory and discovery is exactly what makes Mehfil so special.

Conceived as a live music platform rather than a conventional concert series, Mehfil centres on collaboration across generations, genres and regions. Following its debut in Lahore last year, the Karachi concert marked the first stop of the 2026 three-city tour which will continue to Islamabad and Lahore later this year.

The night brought together the LLMC Ensemble from Hunza with Farhan Saeed and Call The Band. The LLMC Ensemble, trained at the Leif Larsen Music Centre, has become known for keeping the indigenous musical sounds of Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral alive through instruments such as the Dadang, Chitrali Sitar, Xhiggini, rubab and flute, sounds that carry entire geographies within them. Their presence gave the concert a distinct character, especially when traditional folk sounds mixed with pop, rock and orchestral moments.

The music flowed effortlessly through the night. Traditional and contemporary pieces including ‘Ashurjan’, ‘Ya Qurban’, ‘Madhuvanti’, ‘Ranjish’, ‘Tu Jhoom’, ‘Abdul Qadir’, ‘Dam Mast Qalandar’, ‘Dharkay Jia’ and ‘Nishan’, sat alongside anthems we all know by heart, like ‘Sab Bhula Ke’, ‘Laari Chooti’, ‘Pi Jaon’, ‘Khat’, ‘Halka Halka Suroor’ and ‘Aadat’. It wasn’t just a jukebox of hits, though. Each song was reworked where one moment you were swept up in the grand feel of an orchestra, and the next, you were immersed in the raw, high energy of a live band.

It felt like the kind of concert where everyone walked away carrying a slightly different memory of the same songs. The evening concluded with ‘Qataghani,’ bringing the cross-cultural spirit associated with Humnava right onto the Mehfil stage and ending the concert on an energetic note.

Speaking about the project, Xulfi said, “Mehfil came from a very simple but powerful desire: to create a space where different musical worlds could meet each other with honesty, warmth and excitement. We often inherit songs in one form and one memory, but when those same songs are reinterpreted through different instruments, regions and sensibilities, they begin to reveal new emotional colours. That, for me, is where Mehfil becomes special.”

“What moved me most in the first edition was seeing how naturally these worlds came together. Mehfil is about giving Pakistan’s musical diversity the scale, care and stage it deserves,” he concluded.

– Photos by Faiz Qazi