272: Music of Central Asia, Vol. 8: Rainbow, by Kronos Quartet, Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi

Kronos Quartet, Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi (USA/Afghanistan/Azerbaijan)
Music of Central Asia, Vol. 8: Rainbow (2010)
6 tracks, 66 minutes
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Aaaand speaking of the Kronos Quartet (as we were yesterday), here’s a whole album by them! This album is part of the Aga Khan Music Initiative’s wonderful ten-volume Music of Central Asia series. We’ve covered the sixth volume of that series before; that one focussed on Azeri mugham singers Alim & Farghana Qasimov who also feature on this one. Where that album was a set of strictly classical mugham, here, four classical cultures are represented and brought together in different combinations. The Kronos Quartet are the key that links each of the collaborations here, allowing their Western classical string quartet set-up to blend into the other traditions, not to enhance, but to create a new, inter-continental style in a way they have before on such albums as 1992’s Pieces of Africa and 2009’s Floodplain

Rainbow is split into two halves of roughly equal length. The second half sees the Quartet collaborating with the Qasimovs in the mugham and Azeri folk song styles (which they also did on Floodplain), which is of course lovely. But it is the first half of the album that I hold close to my heart.

That first half is dedicated to one 29-minute piece entitled ‘Rangin Kaman’, composed by Homayun Sakhi and arranged by Stephen Prutsman. Sakhi is the world’s leading player of the Afghan rubab, a plucked lute instrument quite similar to the Indian sarod but with a slightly damper, earthier tone. He plays in the Afghan classical style, which is also similar in many ways to Hindustani music, and uses much of the same musical theory, such as ragas and talas as bases for melody and rhythm, respectively, but also bear resemblance in other ways to the Persian and Central Asian classical styles of dastgah and maqam. In this piece, his blending of the Afghan and Western classic styles is sublime, with each part giving the others space to breathe while always gently gravitating in the same direction; when all the instruments move together, it stirs the soul. Sakhi and the Kronos Quartet are joined for this by fellow Afghan Salar Nader on tabla and Uzbek percussion master Abbos Kosimov on doyra (frame drum) and qayraq (clappers), who each bring their own rhythmic traditions to the piece.

I have a beautiful memory of listening to this piece of music. I was with my ever-groovy friend Stephen doing one of those things I love the most – playing music at each other. Sometimes it’s things you both know and love, often it’s tracks that one thinks the other would dig and they usually do. It’s like a mutual DJ session that becomes a voyage of musical discovery. As it goes, we were playing different bits of music from all over the world for the other to pick up on, and chatting about the music, the meanings and life and nothing in general. The overall direction of the conversation and musical choices throughout the evening led me to stick this piece on. ‘This is a long one, so I’ll just play a bit of it so you get the idea.’ And then I did, and the conversation stopped. Not in a bad way, and without tension, but we were both immediately and completely drawn into the music. We sat there enraptured. Of course I’d heard the piece before, enough to know how good it was, but this experience was something else – in that 29-minute moment, it went from a nice piece of music to one of my dearest pieces of all. During the length of the piece, the light of the day faded from a dusky twilight to night time, and by the time Homayun Sakhi, Salar Nader, Abbos Kosimov and the Kronos Quartet drew the piece to its stirring conclusion, we were both sat, utterly dumbfounded, in the dark. The silence afterwards rang heavy while we contemplated what had just happened, like at the end of a long and satisfying book. ‘Wow,’ said Stephen.

That’s probably an overlong story that only really matters to me because I was a joint-protagonist in it and experienced half of it first-hand. It hits home the power and mysteriousness of music: that you can think you know a piece well, but then you listen to it in a different situation and it shows you a completely new side of itself, and changing what you think you thought about a lot of things. This album is just one of an amazing series of records, and just one of the Kronos Quartet’s 46 years of amazing work and collaboration, but for me, it represents 29 perfect minutes of my life.