Ali Sethi on Tour
Pakistani singer/songwriter, composer and author Ali Sethi creates infectious music that blends genres, challenges traditional gender roles and has amassed a huge international audience with its infectious rhythms and global themes.
Sethi was included on TIME magazine's Next 100 list in 2022 and was praised for his use of ancient forms of music "to challenge and expand notions of gender, sexuality, and belonging."
His song "Pasoori" with co-vocalist Shae Gill has been streamed on YouTube more than 400 million times and he's known to have a huge following in India.
Sethi's live performances combine traditional ancient and baroque elements with modern synths and keyboards and provide warmth and inspiration on even the bleakest of days. Be sure to catch Ali Sethi live when he comes to a city near you.
Ali Sethi Live in Concert
Ali Sethi was born and raised in Pakistan in the 1980s and is the son of two award-winning journalists. When Sethi was 14, his father was arrested for allegedly making a "treasonous speech" in India, and was later acquitted and awarded Amnesty International's Journalist of the Year Award.
Sethi grew up in a household where his mother and father were always playing music, although he wasn't initially interested in the music lessons that his mother signed him up for when he was 8.
Later inspired by Noor Jehan's Punjabi songs and traditional South Asian music, he naturally developed his singing talents with encouragement from his mother and to impress his parents' friends at social gatherings.
He later trained for 12 years with gurus of voice in his native Lahore, Pakistan. To attend college he relocated to the East Coast in the U.S. and graduated from Harvard University. He later relocated to New York and made a name for himself as an author, publishing The Wishmaker, his debut novel in 2009. Telling complex and compelling stories both on the page and in his music, Sethi adeptly blends inspiration from ancient sources with a modern aesthetic. As Sethi says, "I load my songs with baroque themes and metaphors because they allow for multiple interpretations. It's a gloriously campy worldview that gave me solace as an out-of-place kid in Pakistan."