Artist: Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn
Rider
Album: Silent City
Year: 2008
Line-up: Kayhan Kalhor – kamancheh,
setar
Brooklyn Rider:
Colin Jacobsen – violin
Jonathan Gandelsman – violin
Nicholas Cords – viola
Eric Jacobsen – cello
Jeff Beecher – bass
Siamak Aghaei – santur, tombak
Mark Suter – cajon, doira, djembe
bodhran, ghaval, pods, shells and metals
Label: World Village
A day of silence
Can be a pilgrimage in
itself
Every once and a while one comes across a musical work which is able
to capture both the imagination and evoke various feelings on the
listener by simply being something totally unique, beautiful,
creative and exciting. Yet somehow, no matter how strongly we feel
about this music and are fascinated by it, we find it almost
impossible to capture those feelings and put them into words.
Sometimes the music escapes the chains of language and all the word
we seek to describe these sounds helplessly run through our fingers
like sand. These kinds thoughts Silent City has aroused in me
ever since I set myself to produce my next writing about this
particular album.
Silent
City is a collaborative effort
between one of the most important Iranian composers and kamancheh
players of today, Kayhan Kalhor and New York-based classical string
quartet known for their unusual and contemporary repertoire. The
project saw its' birth in 2000 at the Tanglewood Music Center in
Lenox, Massachusetts while Kayhan Kalhor and the members of Brooklyn
Rider were taking part in ambitious effort initiated by the world
famous classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The Silk Road Project is a
not-for-profit organization which goal is to expand and study the
multicultural and musical relationships of the historic training
route of Silk Road. During this project Brooklyn Rider was part of
performing a new composition by Kayhan Kalhor specifically composed
for the occasion titled Blue as the Turquoise Night of
Neyshabur. They were
tremendously affected by the common modes and rhythmic grooves which
offered them such a rewarding method of musical communication and the
ease of co-existence of Persian musical traditions alongside with
American minimalism and early European music.
Among
with becoming personal friends of Kalhor, Brooklyn Rider were so
taken by their experiences with Silk Road Project that they began to
pursue a way of creating a dynamic musical vehicle that could produce
something new and innovative which would hopefully breed meaningful
musical experiences and communicate with a wide variety of different
audiences. At the same time, their friendship with Kalhor evolved to
the state that they began dreaming and visioning a studio record
which would bring their musical collaboration not only to a new level
but also to a wider audience. Silent City is
the product of these studio sessions which the artists regard as
their personal musical laboratory which enabled them to explore the
possibilities of the intimacy between string quartet and kamancheh
and study the common grounds of their respective cultures and
traditions.
As
I said earlier, I feel almost amazed how difficult I find it to try
and describe verbally Silent City in
a manner that would please me personally and make this record
justice. Not only is the music itself beyond my verbal reach as it
truly something truly remarkable and extraordinary, but all of the
four compositions featured here have their own very distinct
character and tone. Silent City opens
with Ascending Bird which
takes a traditional Persian tune as its' reference point on top which
original material has been written. The music tries to capture a
mythical story of a bird attempting to fly to the sun. Failing on two
first attempts on the third one the bird finally manages to free
itself of its' physical body as it embraces the sun – a metaphor of
spiritual transcendence. The third track, Parvaz is
Kalhor's personal take on the same story where the bird is called to
recite the 1001 names of the Creator and failing to remember the
1001th
name, the bird is ultimately consumed by its' Beloved Sun. Kalhor
plays here the setar (a long-necked wooden lute with four strings)
which is considered a narrative instrument in Iran as it was usually
the instrument of choice of the bardic poets and storytellers of the
past.
The
center piece of the album is definitely the title track not by only
its' enormous length of nearly 30 minutes but also by its' high
artistic quality. Silent City is
the music of silence, an aural prayer without words, a personal
journey, an experience. It tells the tragic tale of the town of
Halabjah in Iraqi Kurdistan: On March 16, 1988, after two days of
conventional artillery attacks, the Iraqi military forces dropped gas
canisters on the town accompanied by bombs, artillery attacks and
further chemical weapons resulting in the immediate death of at least
5 000 people and 7 000 people being injured and suffering long term
illness. Most of the victims were Kurdish civilians. Later the Iraqi
forces destroyed the town completely. Silent City serves
as an elegy and a testament of only of this tragic but also of other
fallen cities and civilisations. More importantly it attempts to
arouse hope by the idea that life always returns growing and
sprouting once again from the desolate landscapes. The album ends
with a composition by the Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen
titled Beloved, do not let me be discouraged. The
inspiration for this piece comes from a legendary tale of Layla
and Majun, which is a story
about ill-fated lovers similar to Romeo and Juliet.
Musically, it draws inspiration
from the chamber version of Hajibeyov's opera of the same story
performed by the legendary Azeri mugham singer Alim Qasimov and from
the genre of sacred songs called Laude of
the 14th
Italy where Jacobsen found many similarities of devotional feel of
joyful praise and penitence of Layla and Majnun.
The
meeting of the Persian kamancheh and Western string quartet, the
dialogue between the ethnic traditions of the East and the Western
Art Music together here spawns something totally new and exciting
which is not just an East meets West type of fusion project but
something truly unique and beyond conventional categorizing. Silent
City is a small monolith of
beauty and art which opens up a window to a new historical and
contemporary musical world.
Take
a listen:
This
is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever
interests the rest interests me..
Walt
Whitman – Song of Myself
Written
by Παναγιωτιης
