At the Origins of a Sound: Ahmed Newaz and the Souls Years
Before he was widely known as a painter, Ahmed Newaz helped build one of Bangladesh's most beloved bands. The two lives have never really been separate.
In the early 1970s, in the uncertain years just after Bangladesh's independence, a group of music-obsessed young men in Chattogram set out to build something new. Out of that restless energy came a band that would become one of the most beloved and influential rock groups in the country's history. Ahmed Newaz was among its founders.
The band would come to be known as Souls — a name now woven into the story of Bengali popular music. Newaz played keyboards, helping to shape the group's early sound through its formative decades. It is easy, decades later, to underestimate how new this was. There was little infrastructure, few models to follow, and a country still finding its footing. To choose band music then was to invent a path as you walked it.
Souls went on to release Bangladesh's first full-length band album, and to help define a generation of Bengali rock. For listeners, the songs became the soundtrack to a particular moment of optimism and reinvention. For the musicians, it was the start of a movement: Newaz's role as a founding member places him at the very origins of the country's band-music scene.
What's striking, looking back, is how naturally the music and the painting coexisted. The same person who sat at the keyboard was, in the same years, holding his first solo exhibition and completing a fine-arts degree. He did not treat them as competing careers but as two dialects of the same impulse — to give shape to feeling. The discipline of composition, the patience of rehearsal, the search for the right phrase: these belong as much to the studio as to the stage.
That dual life also says something about the era. Newaz belongs to a generation whose creative and civic lives were bound up with the birth of Bangladesh itself — a freedom fighter as well as an artist and musician. Culture, for them, was not decoration; it was part of imagining what the new country could be.
Today the music and the visual art finally share a room. Echoes of Creation, Newaz's first full retrospective, runs from 29 July to 2 August 2026 at the Aloki Convention Centre in Dhaka, and deliberately spans both worlds — painting and archive alongside musical soirées and cultural evenings. It is a chance to see a single sensibility expressed in two mediums at once: the keyboard and the canvas, finally on the same wall.
For anyone who grew up with Souls on the radio, it may be a surprise to learn that one of its founders has spent the decades since filling canvases. For anyone who knows him as a painter, the music is the missing first chapter. Echoes of Creation is where the two chapters meet.