Tag: folk

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elephant songs in suleymaniyah

 
 

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October 2013 saw another episode of Elephant Songs, my ongoing project in which musicians from different backgrounds meet and create original music together. This time, the backdrop was Suleymaniyah, the economic heart of Iraqi Kurdistan. An anonymous development aid NGO commissioned me to invite musicians from Iran (where I spent a few months on my drumbiker trip in 2012) and bring them together with colleagues in Suleymaniyah. The resulting line-up could be called a worldjazz quintet: Savel Fatih (Suly) on saxophone (consistently called saxyphone by everyone), Kaveh Kamjou (Tehran) on oud, the bass guitar was played by Ari Ali (Suly), percussion by Arash Lotfi (Tehran), and yours truly (from the low lands, Brussels / Amsterdam) played the drums. We spent a week preparing an evening’s worth of music, leading to a concert at Caffe11 on the night of 10 October. Next to rehearsing, Arash and I taught a rhythm workshop to local musicians too. We played one of the pieces we worked on as the opening piece for the final concert.

The group was a great mixture of cultures and backgrounds. Ari lived in Baghdad for most of his adult life and claimed his Arabic might be better than his Kurdish. Meanwhile Kaveh, though living in Tehran since a long time, is an Iranian Kurd and as it turned out, his Kermanshah Kurdish and Iraqi Kurdish were close enough to be mutually understandable. The Iranian language Farsi itself is apparently not too distant from Kurdish and moreover many Kurds speak it, so the week’s communication sounded in at least three languages. From a musical perspective, Savel is equally happy inventing folklorish songs, like the tune Fisherman Culture he contributed, and playing American jazz traditionals – in fact he suggested to play the classic Scott Joplin hit The Entertainer, the only non-original piece of the evening. Arash is at least as proud of his Persian music skills as of his vast knowledge of European classical music, while your humble correspondent has dabbled in a few different traditions himself as well.

Creating new music with a group as diverse as this is obviously not without challenges. “This melody has no good place on my instrument”, someone said when someone else was trying to teach them a new song. How to respect people’s backgrounds & preferences whilst still daring to challenge them? This question was faced by all of us, as we all took turns in leading the creation of a piece.

Savel came up with the afore-mentioned Fisherman Culture, on a groove that Arash was playing around with. Kaveh brought a beautiful tune he called Khazan, Farsi for autumn – the season that was just beginning. Arash and I devised some rhythmical games for the introduction. Arash has been exploring the mouth harp in recent times – as he already showed in last year’s improvised trio gig in Tehran (featuring Kaveh as well) – and wanted to create a piece showcasing five different ones. This resulted in his Lab Chang Concerto – including kadenzen, of course – that we tried out in a few places before the official show, the Shaeb Chaikhana among them. Ari contributed a very danceable reggae version of the traditional Kurdish melody Hewraman that he recently discovered working on another project, and finally my melody Muggosphere got a new treatment, including some fantastic oud work by Kaveh.

I made a short documentary about the process of creating music together, about beginnings of beautiful friendships, showing markets and people, tea houses and coffee bars. And stroopwafels. Enjoy!

elephant song birth, a short documentary about the elephant songs music meeting in suleymaniyah, iraqi kurdistan, in october 2013

The show was filmed by the great San Saravan and his friend Rebin Jaza; many others – including all musicians, cultural network wizard Neil van der Linden and surprise-visitor (and my father) Jan van Hulzen – have pointed cameras at whatever they considered relevant, funny, useful, or otherwise interesting enough to save for posterity.
Elephant Songs in Suleymaniyah was another fantastic project. I’m currently working on new plans involving Tehran and possible Tajikistan, stay tuned for updates. Meanwhile, let’s see the response this doculette will generate. Any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions welcome.

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songs of beyoğlu

 
 

Besides the most enjoyable improvised sessions I took part in in Istanbul (with Sumru and Anıl, with various musicians on the Elephant Songs night in Kooperatif on 10 August, and upcoming on 20 August in jazzclub Nina – material of those last two events coming up, check back or subscribe), I was very lucky to have a few cosy evenings at the studio of streetfolk legends Kara Güneş. I had fantastic cheese, fell in love with the santoor, and had great chats with many wonderful people.With one of their members, multi-instrumentalist Özgür, and cellist Duygu Demir, we played with and improvised on songs, grooves, and ideas we all brought.

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safranbolu songs

 
 

safranbolu
the old ottoman town safranbolu
In the part of the world I have now reached, tourism no longer means Backpackistan: Safranbolu is the territory of large touringcars, Koreans with elaborate cameras, unwinding pensioners, and European families on exotic summer holidays (as it happens, that’s how I came to Turkey the first time, when I was fifteen). The upside: almost-decent espresso. Which was very welcome during the hours the electricity was cut, eliminating one of the reasons I stayed a full day instead of just making this an overnight stop on my way to New Musical Adventures in Istanbul: updating my blog and catching up with audio and video editing before collecting new material. So instead, I sat in a café reading my book and walked around in this beautiful Ottoman town.

alarm
bike with newly installed alarm system
The place is filled with small shops selling all kinds of handicrafts, from textile to metalworks. I used the opportunity to finally invest in an alarm system for my bike – just in time, as I’m heading to Europe. Suggested by the ever-resourceful Benno Graas, I now have a beautiful little bell to hang from an unseen place on the bike at night, whose glassy tinkle will no doubt wake me up should someone with dishonourable intentions come near the bike.

stall
bells, kettles, and other metalworks
music meeting
robbert van hulzen (drums, left) & ali yapıcı (bağlama) (photo by soonjung lee)
The evening brought a pleasant surprise: Ali Yapıcı not only runs the charming Bastoncu Pansiyon (in a beautiful old Ottoman house, all old wood and roughly hewn stone and off-white plaster), he also has a powerful voice and plays the bağlama, a lute-type instrument with three sets of strings played with a soft plastic pick. The strings are tuned to the tonic, fourth, and fifth, and the frets create a scale that has pleasantly little to do with that western totalitarian system, equal temperament. I unpacked a small selection of my drums, and, cheered on by other hotel guests, we enjoyed an hour playing of Turkish folk songs.

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elephant songs: ba1pa, on one leg

 
 

road
majjid on the road in north iran
The road into the mountains was wet and green and smelled accordingly. At a roadside restaurant our production assistant and general spokesperson complained about the kashk-e-bademjan, one of our lunch dishes.
I liked that about my Iranian friends – their politeness lies in hospitality and courteousness, while they don’t mind giving criticism, or receiving it. Apparently there was something wrong with the bademjan, the aubergine. My mirza ghasemi, roasted aubergine mixed with copious amounts of garlic, was delicious as usual. The proprietress of the eatery acknowledged the complaint, and we said goodbye in friendship.

Mazandaran food would be a happy memory when I got further up north, towards the Azerbaijani border. Do you have any vegetables? No. We are Azeri. We eat meat. Baluchistan food crisis all over again.

camera fix camera fix
attaching the camera to the bike * left photo by golboo fiuze

After our seaside resort days in Neshta Rud we were on our way to a village in the mountains, where Tehrani musician Majjid Rahnama and yours truly were planning to play a concert. Reza Fahramand was going to film it all, hoping to bring the result to film festivals around the world. However, after lunch it was decided that our planned destination was too far away; the village of Jannat Roudbar was considered a great alternative. A good choice, it turned out, especially after a quick musical break on the side of the road unexpectedly took much longer: a car screeched to a halt and out tumbled a very drunk driver and his proud son. Majjid and I ended up accompanying the father on an endless, narrative folk song with an infectiously melodic little chorus. When this suprise meeting was over and my new friend had kissed me full on the lips in goodbye (to great hilarity of my filming companions), we rode on to Jannat Roudbar. We were shown into our comfortable rooms on the second (and top) floor of the house of a lovely couple. The man was concerned about the safety of my bike and insisted on covering it, so caringly we hid it (though of course everyone had seen us enter the place). Over oily, hot, delicious omelet and strong black tea in the lovely village tea house that night I was very happy with our new home-for-a-few-days.

jannat roudbar
our home in jannat roudbar

We spent the next days hanging out, playing in the teahouse, having more tea and omelets, chatting, smoking water pipes. We considered a number of locations for the show. The cemetery, an interesting idea of Reza’s, didn’t work out for various reasons, the disapproval of the local mullah an important one among them. We eventually decided on the square high up on the hill in the village, a more open space than the lower square which was full of shops and trees and other things. A stage was constructed and people gathered. We performed five tunes, in which Majjid played seven different instruments. We didn’t talk before (didn’t even speak each other’s languages), didn’t prepare anything specific, we just sat down as two musicians and played. We played the way we are, relying on each other because we both know music, singing together without words.

 
 

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beach fun

 
 

After finishing the successful shows in Tehran, I had planned to ride through the Alamut Valley to Qazvin, to visit the castles of the Assassins on the way. Then on to Tabriz, and up to Armenia.

beach set-up
our set-up on the beach
However, in the meantime, through CouchSurfing I’d met Komeil, who worked in the film industry and had been involved with documentaries on various topics including Iranian culture and tourism. During the last days of my stay in Tehran we met a few times (in the earlier described Café Un), first just with him, then with a whole team headed by Reza Fahramand, director of the award-winning films Tajrish and Shirzad.
beach filming
majjid and reza ready to shoot
We decided to make a film of a trip undertaken by musician Majjid Rahnama and yours truly, to play a concert somewhere in the valley, or in Qazvin. But this didn’t happen. After long consideratons, the location was changed to the foothills of the Alborz mountains on the Caspian Sea. The reasons were never entirely clear to me, though I did gather that in those more remote areas, filming without all the official permits would be less of a problem. Anyway, I had no reason to complain about this change of plans, the whole trip was amazingly beautiful.
And wet. For some reason (possibly the fact that a large part of their country is made of dry sand and gravel, as I experienced earlier), Iranians love the wetness of the north. “Just like where you’re from!” – as if that was a recommendation.

After the amazing Karaj-Chalus road, we rode up the coast for a while. Before heading into the mountains, we stayed at a beach house in Nashtarud for a couple of nights, swimming in the (cold!) waves and jamming on the beach. In the rain, of course.

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elephant songs: pil ahang at darbast

 
 

darbast
elephant songs at darbast, tehran * poster by amirali ghasemi
When discussing possibilities for playing gigs in Tehran, Amirali (at whose Parkingallery we played on 10 June) put me in touch with Darbast, the concert division of the Mohsen Gallery. After yet another ramble involving more of Tehran’s highways then I really needed at 8 am, I found the place, hidden in a residential area just off Modares Highway – but only reachable through an impossible maze of small streets. Though the problem started already when trying to locate the exit: many streets are known by their old names – while of course only their official, post-revolution names are signposted. I was told to leave the motorway onto Zafar Street, but was close to the Parkway Bridge when it dawned on me I might have missed it. Turned out the street I was looking for is now called Dastgerdi. Of course. But green tea with the lovely Persian sugar subsitute that I forgot the name of (help!) and chocolates made me quickly forget my miseries, and I had a very nice chat with Mohsen boss Ehsan and his people. Oh how I like these people’s sense of time, so much closer to my own: short-term thinking is not frowned upon, but rather the default mode. So we settled on the dates for two shows, and I left with a bag of cds of Mahriz Records, the label that Ehsan recently got involved in, founded by Nader many years ago. Some of the musicians on the albums might be interested in joining, I was told, as might some of the members of Pallett, the band I saw play at Darbast a few days before.

rehearsal
rehearsal with mohammad azmand, soheil peyghambari, daryoush azar, robbert van hulzen, arash lotfi
Over the next few days, I put together two bands for the evening, which both would play a set. A jazz-and-surroundings line-up with Soheil Peyghambari (clarinet), Mohamad Azmand (electric guitar), Daryoush Azar (double bass), Arash Lotfi (percussion), and yours truly (drums) and a more world/folk oriented combination with the musicians of Pallett: Omid Nemati (voice), Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz (clarinet), Kaveh Salehi (acoustic guitar), Behnam Moayerian (oud), Mahyar Tahmasebi (cello), Hessamedin Mohamadianpour (percussion), and the same bass & drums tandem consisting of Daryoush and myself.

rehearsal: rouzbeh esfandarmaz, omid nemati, daryoush azar * photo by shakiba faezipour
rehearsal
rehearsal: hessamedin mohamadian & robbert van hulzen * photo by sanam rahimi

After a week of intense rehearsal, we played two sold out nights (apparently all tickets went in half a day) for very happy audiences.

azmand, peyghambari, van hulzen
mohammad azmand, soheil peyghambari, robbert van hulzen * photo by arash ashoorinia

tahmasebi, moayerian, esfandarmaz
mahyar tahmasebi, behnam moayerian, rouzbeh esfandarmaz * photo by arash ashoorinia

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elephant songs in lahore – multiple contacts

 
 

On Thursday 26 April, a fantastic selection of musicians from the Lahore rock and fusion scene joined elephant songs for a great show at True Brew Studios, Lahore. The evening was recorded by Jamal Rahman and Fatima Shah, and later mixed by Floris van Bergeijk. Jawad Shahid and his crew filmed the event.

We started the evening with a group of musicians you may remember from the music meeting on the rooftop of my hotel a few weeks earlier: maestro Akmal Qadri and his son Ali Abbas on bansuri, Kashif Ali Dani on tabla, and myself on drums – joined for the occasion by guitarist Danish Khwaja of Poor Rich Boy fame.

zam-zamah

raag hans dhun

And now for something completely different: a free rock trio featuring Japanese synth wizard Masaki Okamoto (with his new synth) and riff master Danish Khwaja.

here’s johnny

With rockstar bass player Sameer Ahmed of co-Ven fame and electric sitarist Jamil Rakae we played a beautiful jazzy world set, for lack of a better term. (Can someone with better pr skills help me out here?) Video of this and the other tracks will be up shortly, check back or subscribe to updates. For the time being, enjoy the audio, as stream or download.

rocks?

Here’s a glimpse of what we finished the show with – featuring Danish Khwaja, Sameer Ahmad, Kami Paul, Raavail Sattar, and yours truly.

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peeru’s café

 
 

The first time I went to Peeru’s Café, my landlord Sajjad of Lahore Backpackers insisted I take a rickshaw – “for security”. When I told my driver my destination, well-known for its qawwali performances, he proudly announced he was a qawwal himself and sang all 25 kilometres of the way there. Welcome to Pakistan.

Reaching the place, I was a little surprised by the high, barb-wired fence with the steel gate and armed guards – not just your regular guys dozing in chairs with shotguns in their laps, but uniformed men in bulletproof vests and complex-looking weapons – all dull black angular metal instead of the usual simple steel barrel on a wooden handle. After my bag and I were screened and searched and declared acceptable, I was shown into the compound – a beautiful, quiet, and relaxed place that I later found to be much bigger than what I saw just then: a glass house where juices were made, a small stage, and a number of tables where waiters served food and drinks that were presumably prepared in the building in the back. Only later I learnt that Peeru’s had been attacked several times in the past – with bombs and arson, terrorists attempted, in vain, to disturb and discourage the lively cultural scene promoted there.

When I was preparing my visit to Lahore, Pakistan, my invaluable friend Neil van der Linden had put me in touch with the Peerzada family, who run Peeru’s Café and the Rafi Peer Theatre Group. Peeru’s is part of a compound that houses the café-restaurant, an auditorium, various artist-run arts and crafts shops, the puppetry museum, and the offices of the RPTG. While I was still in India, Mr Faizaan Peerzada kindly helped me obtain my visa for Pakistan, and invited me to come over to discuss what we could mean to each other as soon as I reached Lahore. Meanwhile, playing with Maarten Visser and Keith Peters at the Global Music Festival in Madras, India, I met Sam Mills and Susheela Rahman, who adviced met to get in touch with one Hassan Qureshi in Lahore. Hassan responded enthusiastically, and mentioned his family’s auditorium and their many musician friends. We agreed to meet and talk about possibilities for elephant songs – and Hassan turned out to be married to one of the Peerzada daughters and having an important function in the Rafi Peer organisation. The world is small. Like everywhere.

After meeting them at Peeru’s that first night, the brothers Faizaan and Saadaan took me back to their home right for a lovely evening of chats and drinks and brainstorming about what we could do during my time in Lahore. I was excited to hear them suggest I’d play with the famous dhol players, the sufis Goonga and Mithu Sain. We discussed ideas and set some things in motion and then went back to Peeru’s for dinner – Punjabi food (the cuisine that is served in most so-called Indian restaurants in the west) of such a refined quality that it redefined my opinion on the north-subcontinental kitchen. Contrary to my earlier judgments, I think I actually like it.

The following days many things happened. Sajjad took me around Lahore, showing me the old town and some sufi shrines, including lots of qawwali, and also the Badshahi Mosque. I wandered around a lot, went back for juices at Hafez’s, had almost-vegetarian biryani for lunch. For dinner I often went for the fantastically spicy lentil-and-eggs concoctions served in a small place close to my room, usually dark because of the frequent power cuts (one hour on, one hour off). The boy who cleaned up usually brought me a candle so I could still read my book on the Great Game. I met many more musicians and I had the great honour of playing with Goonga and Mithu Sain on several occasions, including, interestingly, a French cultural evening at LUMS University. (A post with clips of several of these collaborations is coming up, check back or subscribe.)

On Saturday 7 April I was at Peeru’s again. I’d brought my drums, and played for two hours with maestro Mian Meeri and his qawwali troupe. I’m looking forward to what’s next. Apparently, there’s something coming up with the Sain brothers and UK dhol sensation Rani Taj. And I’m working on putting together a dedicated elephant songs show with a lot of different local musicians here in Lahore. Stay tuned.

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jamming with egor in the broadlands

 
 

While I was grumpily attempting to whack the replacement rear subframe into the right spot on my bike so that it would line up with all the appropriate holes in the frame, a short Russian with a razor-straight fringe till just above his eyes started talking to me. The combination of my mood and his complete lack of English kept the conversation fairly superficial, but I did gather he was part of a group or band, which also featured a clarinet and/or saxophone player.
When later that evening I found myself at a birthday party for no one’s birthday in particular, organised by five confident and comfortable girls who in no time fully colonised the top floor terrace of Hotel Broadlands, Egor the saxophonist turned up – with the saxophone he had bought in an antique shop somewhere in Madras.