337: Port, by Forabandit

Forabandit (Turkey/France/Iran)
Port (2014)
10 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The world of musical fusions is a weird one. There are projects out there that fuse music between almost any styles or cultures that you can name, yet the successfulness of the combinations is always hard to tell just by the elevator pitch. Yes, some cultures share enough in common to make such fusions easier to facilitate from a musical point of view – Mande music and the blues, hip-hop and reggae, Hindustani and Persian classical music – but there are no combinations that are necessarily destined to work even from these. So much comes down to the individual artists taking part, their flexibility, their ability to bend their own music to another’s, and just their overall skills as a musician. And because there are so many variables, it also means that unlikely or unusual musical combinations sometimes have just as good a chance at success as the obvious ones. And so we come to Forabandit…

Forabandit’s music brings together the folk styles of Occitania and Anatolia. The band’s project is based on the idea of a shared Mediterranean culture, emphasising the connections between the people from all across the sea’s coasts who have exchanged goods, language and art through trade for millennia. Those cultures are represented in the band by Ulaş Özdemir from Turkey and Samuel Karpienia from Occitania in the south of France; the trio is shored up by Iranian percussion master Bijan Chemirani.

And – and you already knew this, because this is a blog about Good Albums – the fusion works so well that you could be convinced that the three musicians all came from the same culture, rather than those separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea. The sounds of the instruments at play go together perfectly. Özdemir plays the Turkish bağlama in the traditional manner of the Alevi-Bektashi aşik, or wandering bards. The instrument is a long-necked lute with double-coursed strings and frets that allow for all sorts of intriguing quartertone scales. Karpienia, on the other hand, plays the mandocello, which is basically a baritone version of the mandolin, about the size of a guitar. When both of these instruments are playing together, the sound is remarkable. They are similar in many ways – steel strings, double courses – but their slight differences in tone mean that when they play together, it sounds like a weaving: a jangling, shimmering mix of high and low tones through which strands of bağlama or mandocello sometimes reach out to create an elegant thread, maybe entwining briefly with the other before settling back into the fabric. The zarb and daf drums of Chemirani hold it together with a mix of rhythms that take in patterns from Occitan, Turkish and his own Persian styles.

The album is all about these connections, in terms of its sound and its lyrics. It’s named Port, which gives you an idea – all around the Mediterranean, it is the ports that served as sites of cultural exchange and linkage. Port cities are some of the most important cultural centres around the sea for that very reason. There’s Marseille and Istanbul, which are crucial here, but it’s the same across the region: Barcelona, Naples, Oran, Beirut, Thessaloniki… That’s one of the great things about musical fusions, and something this album does so well. It highlights connections between people where otherwise they would have been unclear. In that way, ports help to create great music, but music itself can also be a port of a kind, a place where people from many different regions and backgrounds can come together and discover similarities and interesting differences, and work together to create something new in a way that benefits all involved.

129: Peace of Love, by Zarbang Quartet

Zarbang Quartet (Iran/Greece/Afghanistan)
Peace of Love (2011)
8 tracks, 52 minutes
Not only can I not find this album anywhere online to stream or buy, I can barely even find mention of it. As far as I can tell, it was also released with the tracks in a different order as Dance of the Sea, but even then, barely any information anywhere at all. Bizarre. I’ve stuck it on Google Drive for you to download it, though.

Some collaborations just make you think ‘what on Earth made you think to combine these musical elements in this way?’ Usually, projects that beg that question end up falling flat and losing the best bits of every style involved. That’s not the case with the Zarbang Quartet.

Zarbang are actually quite a well-respected Persian percussion group based in Germany, playing with many different line-ups over the years, but in this quartet form, they’re a little different. Zarbang founders, percussionists (and brothers) Behnam and Reza Samani, are the two in the four that represent Iran, and welcome Afghan percussionist Hakim Ludin and Greek player of the Pontic lýra (bowed lute) Matthaios Tsahouridis to their sound.

There’s something really cool about the way the quartet is set up, the massed percussion backing one single melody instrument. The percussion mostly consists of hand drums of various shapes – the tombak goblet drum, the large daf frame drum and the small riqq tambourine, as well as occasional cameos from the cajón box drum and the udu water pot – which are all capable of stunningly complex rhythms and overlapping harmonics, but they never overpower the lýra.

The way Tsahouridis plays the lýra (and sings) traces the influences to and from the Pontic tradition, reflecting the cultural identity of the region of Pontus as a Greek settlement in what is now Turkey. In his hands, the instrument’s position in a long temporal and geographical chain becomes apparent: not only is the lýra’s connection to other Greek instruments clear, it also resembles the Turkish and Persian kemençe/kamancheh and the Arabic rebab, and then onto the kobyz of Central Asia and the sarangi of India, as well as the gusle and the gadulka in the Balkans, in the other direction. It’s amazing how the most subtle playing techniques, a melodic twiddle here or a rhythmic flick of the wrist can imply so much history and geography.

I find it really strange that this album has almost completely disappeared from the internet’s knowledge. It’s a really great listen, and it definitely deserves more notice than the absolute zero that it has at the moment. Why not do the world a favour: give this album a listen, and if you like it, tell someone else about it too!

091: Love Songs and Trance Music from Balochistan, by Abdulrahman Surizehi

Abdulrahman Surizehi (Balochistan/Iran)
Love Songs and Trance Music from Balochistan (2006)
13 tracks, 133 minutes (2CD)
Spotify • iTunes

One of the most exciting things about music is discovering a great new sound you’ve never heard before; a subsection of this (and one that happens rather rarely) is finding out about an interesting instrument that makes a unique sound that had previously evaded your knowledge. That’s what I had when I first heard/saw the instrument that you hear on this album.

I actually first saw it on a documentary about Afghan musicians, where it was called an ‘electric banjo,’ but it definitely didn’t look like that. It was like a lap steel guitar, but with keys instead of a slide or frets. Then I did some digging and found out its wonderful story. In the Indian subcontinent, the acoustic version of the instrument is also known as the bulbul tarang, but it’s thought to have been directly adapted from the Japanese taishogoto, which itself evolved as a German-inspired mixture between the koto zither and…a typewriter. Not only that, but the Japanese instrument also made it to East Africa where it became absorbed into the taarab ensemble. An instrument with a global history that I’d somehow never heard of – I love it!

For Abdulrahman Surizehi, the instrument is called the benju, and he uses it to play the classical and folk music of Balochistan and the Baloch people. Balochistan is a historic region that spans areas of modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran; Surizehi hails from the Iranian portion. The Balochi culture is much closer to that of Afghanistan and the subcontinent, however, and that can be clearly heard on this album.

This is a double album, so there’s lots of music to be enjoyed on here (although it’s rather impractical as part of a record collection, as you might be able to tell by the shape of the cover). Each of the discs is made up of one of the two themes, with CD1 made up of nine folk melodies and CD2 dedicated to four extended medleys of religious pieces. The lyrical themes are all implied, of course, as this is an instrumental showcase for Surizehi’s benju, backed only by tambura drone and dokhor drum. Over the course of the album, though, you can get a real sense of the range available to the instrument, from joyous to sincere. My favourite track is something a bit different again, the last one from the first CD, ‘Min Gudbrandsdal.’ It’s Surizehi’s own composition, and it means ‘My Gudbrandsdal’ in Norwegian, after his adopted home. It’s a really cheerful mix of a Scandinavian folk-style melody in the Balochi setting, and it’s dead catchy.

It’s always a thrill to hear something new. A banjo-typewriter hybrid playing folk music from a country that doesn’t exist? You know you’re in for a treat.

075: Ariwo, by Ariwo

Ariwo (Iran/Cuba)
Ariwo (2017)
4 tracks, 45 minutes
Bandcamp • Spotify • iTunes

By looking at the little (Iran/Cuba) up there, you might be expecting something different. I know I was when I first came across the group. I reckon I was thinking maybe salsa music with tar and daf, perhaps? I’m not sure, but it didn’t sound too promising. But Ariwo are nothing like that.

The band as they appear on this debut album are a trio of Cubans in percussionists Oreste Noda and Hammadi Valdes and jazz trumpeter Yelfris Valdes, together with Iranian producer and electronicist Pouya Ehsaei. When they make music together, it is a pulsating mix of electronica, traditional Afro-Cuban religious music and jazz. It’s downtempo and dark, and dubby in places. It’s very serious in its own way, profound even, but you can tell everyone’s having a great time of it. It all sounds so natural, helped by the ease at which the musicians interact.

Pouya’s drum programming mingles with the Latin percussion so smoothly as to eventually sound like it’s all from one tradition, and the synth-bass and other electronics make a perfect bed for both the jazz trumpet and Afro-Cuban chants. Then, on top of all that, it is all produced and treated with many delays, distortions, reverbs and other sonic refigurements to give everything the necessary amount of space, depth and intensity. It somehow manages to be both danceable and contemplative at once, although there are times where the balance shifts more to one end than the other. For a debut, Ariwo seems like such an accomplished work. There may only be four tracks, but you still get your album’s worth – nothing is rushed, the pieces all develop at their own pace, swelling and diminishing and changing course whenever it’s right but always with the same destination in mind.

Ariwo have their second album, Quasi, coming out next month – in fact, they have just announced today that it will be out on the 15th April. There's some changes: Canadian jazzer Jay Phelps steps into the role as trumpeter, and it also features Binker Golding as a guest on several tracks, who is one of my favourite saxophonists in the UK today. With two years of gigs, festivals and jams all over the world to let their sound percolate, I really can’t wait to hear what they’ve come up with.

039: Codex, by Mohammad Reza Mortazavi

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Iran)
Codex (2013)
5 tracks, 45 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is one man with a drum, although you wouldn’t know it. Born in Iran and a long-time resident of Berlin, Germany, he has mastered the tombak goblet drum and the large daf frame drum. Actually, not just mastered, he’s completely changed how the drums can be played. Mortazavi has created at least 30 new ways in which to coax different sounds out of them with just his nimble fingers. This is beyond virtuosic – this is revolutionary.

Codex is a 45-minute unbroken performance created entirely with the tombak. It’s recorded without loops, without overdubs, and without any sort of studio trickery save the smallest hint of reverb. One man with a drum. The sounds he gets out of it are unreal. It can be trickling water one moment, and cellos or xylophones the next. Sometimes there’s even a dubstep thing going on, wobbly bass and all, all without breaking the beat. And it’s never one thing at a time – he gets all of these sounds and rhythms going on top of each other. It really makes you wonder how many fingers that guy actually has, let alone the brainspace to hold it all in.

It puts me in mind a little bit of the Laraaji album I covered, in the way that it is made up of endless changing patterns that draw you in, get all the way inside your head and leave you completely mesmerised. At one point, my brain was even telling me there were voices coming out of the reverb, but it’s all a trick being played by the overtones of the tombak’s single goatskin.

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s skills have to be seen to be believed, and even then, you’ll probably not. This album is a good place to start wrapping your head around it, though.