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.

199: Music of Central Asia, Vol. 6: Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan, by Alim Qasimov and Farghana Qasimova

Alim Qasimov and Farghana Qasimova (Azerbaijan)
Music of Central Asia, Vol. 6: Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan (2007)
11 tracks, 71 minutes
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This is another album from a phenomenal set of releases, the Aga Khan Music Initiative’s ten-album Music of Central Asia series. The AKMI is an initiative overseen by the Aga Khan, the leader of the Nizari Ismailis within Islam, and its stated aim is to promote, internationally, the music of all those from Muslim lands and to educate people about this music both in its native cultures and around the world. This CD series, which ran from its first release in 2006 to 2012, was the initiative’s first project and focuses, as its name would suggest, on the classical and folk musics of Central Asia and its historical cultural links. There are albums in the series which focus on music from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, as well as collaborations with Chinese, Indian and American musicians and an album by the specially-created interesting pan-regional, all-female ensemble Bardic Divas. Again, this is a record series of the highest quality, and if you want to set off on a journey into Central Asian music, it’s one of the best places you can start. I will write about another album in the series later on in the year sometime, because it’s a little different, but for now I’ve chosen to write about this one by Alim Qasimov and Farghana Qasimova, performers of mugham music from Azerbaijan.

Admittedly, choosing this album has put me in a bit of an awkward position, because I’ve basically written as much as I really feel qualified to write about mugham back when I covered the album by Gochag Askarov. But I really wanted to include this album in the list because Alim Qasimov is considered the grandmaster of the style. Listening to Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan makes it clear why: his voice and his technique are infinitely subtle, and so powerful even when the passages are quiet – it feels as though his voice is an intense dam holding back the ferocity of the true might of mugham in full swing. What else makes this album special is that it is a series of duets with his daughter, Farghana Qasimova, who is herself a young master of the style. While it is not unknown for women to perform mugham, duets of any kind are incredibly rare, and male-female duets especially. Because Farghana learnt the art at her father’s knee, their personal styles are very similar, and their aim is to sing separately, but ‘with one voice,’ each representing two halves of one whole.

On this album, they together showcase a range of mugham performance styles, beginning will a full, seven-part mugham suite and finishing up with four more modern compositions that take the classical style in a different direction, or focus on its folk-based origins. Also, the last track is called ‘Köhlen Atim’, which translates to ‘My Splendid Horse’ or, if you will, ‘My Lovely Horse’, so I like that, it’s good.

If you want to know more about this album as you listen to it, the full, in-depth liner notes are available at the AKMI website, including lyrics and discussion of every piece – and that’s the case for the whole series too, it really is a wonderful resource. Hopefully this volume can lead you on to listening to all the others in the series in time – so there’s ten Good Albums for the price of one!

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!