James at 62: 'I don't keep track of achievements or unfulfillment'

James does not do birthdays. He turns 62 today, and the ritual, as it always has, belongs to everyone but him. "I've never celebrated my birthday on a grand scale," he says. "The fans celebrate it, and I observe that."

It is a fitting posture for a man who has spent four decades at the centre of Bangladesh's band music while insisting he stands slightly to one side of it. Faruq Mahfuz Anam, the name on the certificate, the "Guru" to everyone else, founded Feelings in 1977, renamed it Nagar Baul, and the rest, as they say, is history.

He has sung for Bollywood, won two National Film Awards, and watched his songs pass from the stage into fields and onto riverbanks. And yet, at 62, the thing he is best known for making music- is the thing he has quietly stopped doing.

The reason is not mystery but exhaustion. "Yes, there are plans, and work is ongoing," he says of new music. "However, due to continuous touring, I often get exhausted. Between live shows and touring, it's been difficult to carve out dedicated time." 

The global tours and the local shows leave little room for the slow work of composition — and James, by his own admission, has never been one to labour over a track. 

"I create a basic framework for a song, and then it evolves dynamically during live performances. I prefer keeping the structure open and flexible rather than rigid."

"There is so much music available that even if no new songs were produced for the next 20 years, people could easily keep listening to everything and still have room for more."

But there is a deeper blues beneath the busyness, and it surfaces when he is asked whether the golden age of band music still exists. His answer begins, unexpectedly, with a camera.

"Photographers might understand this best," he says. "Photography used to be a specialised discipline, but now the field has become oversaturated. Music today is similarly saturated." James is himself an avid photographer — a man who loves portraits because he loves capturing people — and the parallel is not idle. He remembers when a photographer was somebody, when the craft carried weight.

Now, he suggests, everyone has a camera or a phone, and the specialness has thinned out. Music has gone the same way. "There is so much music available that even if no new songs were produced for the next 20 years, people could easily keep listening to everything and still have room for more."

This is where the questions turn to the economics of his art — and where James is at his most unsentimental. Asked how a musician with decades of records balances composing, performing and touring, he reaches again for the free-ness of it all. "When music moved to digital streaming platforms like Spotify or YouTube, it essentially became free. When you offer everything for free, people's expectations shift. Nowadays, those who excel in live performances are the ones who can sustain themselves." 

The stage, in other words, is no longer the celebration of the record — it is the livelihood that the record can no longer provide.

Press him on the obvious upside — that streaming lets a whole new generation, one that never saw his peak, reach his catalogue in a single tap — and he does not deny it, but he does not soften either. "As I said, the market is saturated. There are brilliant photographers today who don't get the full material value of their work because of saturation." 

Today's young musicians, he insists, are immensely talented — "arguably more talented than we were" — but they inherit a world where music relies purely on passion.

And passion, for James, is the thing that survives the flood. "Genuine passion keeps art forms alive, much like traditional pottery," he says. Culture, as he puts it elsewhere, "is like a flowing river; it must keep flowing. If you block it, it gets obstructed."

At 62, the Guru is still flowing. He has simply stopped counting what the river carries. "I don't keep track of achievements or unfulfillment," he says. "I don't dwell on what I received or didn't receive." Then, almost as an afterthought, the only change he will admit to in forty years: "Maybe I have a bit less hair on my head now."