11/11/2013

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider - Silent City

 
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
        Hafez - Silence

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

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