147: Music from Azerbaijan, by Gochag Askarov and Mugham Ensemble Turan

Gochag Askarov and Mugham Ensemble Turan (Azerbaijan)
Music from Azerbaijan (2010)
5 tracks, 61 minutes
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Gochag Askarov was the very first performer of Azeri mugham that I ever encountered – actually, he was the first ever musician from Azerbaijan that I’d ever heard at all. Askarov and his group were performing at a festival I was at, and I literally went to check out his performance because it was new to me. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There was so much in there that I recognised within this music that I didn’t know at all. The instruments and their roles reminded me of Arabic classical music, but the vocals seemed to have a direct connection to the qawwali music of South Asia.

Azerbaijan’s location in the Caucasus gives it access to all these musical histories spanning across the Asian continent – Azeris are a Turkic people, linking them with the cultures of Turkey in the west and Central Asia in the east, all the way up to the Uyghurs in modern-day China, but their proximity to Iran means that there is also very heavy influence from Persian cultures and, through that connection, Arabic and South Asian cultures too. The style that Askarov performs, mugham, is very much linked to all of these cultures, as it is just one of a whole continuum of styles that include makam of Turkey, maqam in the Arabic world, the Persian dastgah, the shashmaqom of the Uzbeks and the on ikki muqam of the Uyghur, and which can even be extended to include the ragas of South Asia with the slightest of imagination. These are classical styles that draw on the folk musics of their regions.

Mugham itself is a stately and virtuosic style that shows off the skills of its performers through their delicate manipulations of the melodies and scales and the mastery of the tiny ornaments that fill the music. For singers, such as Askarov, mugham demands a huge range of both pitch and dynamics, with melody lines often maintaining a very high pitch for a sustained period, and featuring varieties of yodels between various intervals of notes.

The living master of mugham is certainly Alim Qasimov, but Askarov is seen as the leading member of the younger generation of musicians, poised for ascendency. The accompanists here, Malik Mansurov on tar and oud (lutes), Elnur Mikailov on kamancha (spike fiddle) and Shukur Aliyev on ghaval (frame drum) and nagara (barrel drum), are all top-level players from the school of the arts in Baku, and accompany many of the country’s most famous musicians (I even saw them on Eurovision once). Their work together then, as heard on several albums, is a great way to get acquainted with the music.

This album in particular is a mix of different styles of mugham, with folk songs, ballads and instrumental pieces, but the centrepiece is the first track, a half-hour performance of ‘Dastgah Bayati-Shiraz’. In the Azeri sense, a dastgah is a complete mugham suite, including composed poetry, improvisations, unmetred sections and instrumental sections, and the main themes of the mugham are developed throughout.

Wow, I’ve done a lot of going on about this one. Sorry about that. Basically: if you don’t know about Azeri mugham, maybe you know a little bit now, and Music from Azerbaijan will set you up well for future adventures. Happy listening!