Sam Zaman: Musician who emerged from London’s Asian Underground to work with Bjork and Massive Attack

Sam Zaman was a musician, DJ and producer who emerged from London’s “Asian Underground” scene in the 1990s. By the time he started working as a DJ at Talvin Singh’s infamous Anokha club night, he had adopted “State Of Bengal” as his stage name, which had been the name of a rap outfit he had founded with his brother Deedar (who later joined Asian Dub Foundation) and MC Mushtaq, who went on to become lead rapper with Fun-Da-Mental.

Anokha and the Asian Underground movement provided British Asian youth with a homegrown alternative to the more standard/mainstream Asian dance music fodder of the time, bhangra and Bollywood, of which they had begun to tire. It also gave them a renewed sense of pride in their identities.

Zaman’s eclectic tastes and musical identity had been shaped by the peripatetic nature of his family; his father, a homeopathic doctor, moved the family to a variety of locations; starting off in Pakistan, they moved on to the Turkish capital of Ankara, before Amman in Jordan, and then Bangladesh, before settling in London in the early 1970s.

Zaman’s work built bridges between East and West, traditional and contemporary, folk and classical, and between generations and cultures; he is perhaps most significantly remembered for the two collaborative albums he made for the Real World label. Tana Tani (“Push and Pull”) was made with singer and dubki player Paban Das Baul, a member of the mystical Bengali sect of Baulsingers.

In a 2004 feature for fRoots magazine, Jamie Renton described the album as “more of a battle of wills than a collaboration!”, and Zaman’s approach to modernising the music may have proved something of a challenge. In an interview on the Rolling Stone India website he said: “The whole idea of artistic … development is that you change it for the time, that you do move it forward for the time. It ain’t about keeping it the same for 200 years, that’s bollocks.”

Zaman deliberately dragged Paban outside his comfort zone as a traditional musician; they had met at a tribute concert for the late Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a key source of inspiration for Zaman. He took part in Real World’s Nusrat remix album Star Rise, and his work on the track “Shadow” impressed the qawwali maestro so much that he invited Zaman to produce the album Nusrat was working on at the time of his death.

Zaman also appeared on the 1999 album Walking On with the late Indian psych-rock sitar fusionist Ananda Shankar, of whom he had long been an admirer. James had become a fan of Zaman after hearing his track, “Streets Of Calcutta”, which led him to suggest the Shankar project in 1997.

On the Real World website, Alan James, who steered Zaman through Walking On, recalled: “Sam Zaman was a delight to work with” and praised his playful sense of humour, his warmth, loyalty and generosity of spirit for putting his trust in the hands of a novice producer.

Zaman, who died of a suspected heart attack, fell naturally into a productive role as a remixer after his work at Anokha; it was there that Björk “discovered” him, leading to remix work and his opening for her on the world tour to promote her Homogenic album. He also remixed Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album in 2008 and made his own final album, Skip-lj, for the Betelnut label in 2007.

Saimullah Zaman, DJ and producer: born Karachi 16 April 1965; married (marriage dissolved); died 19 May 2015.