iran – robbert van hulzen

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.

2 October 201312 January 2014

elephant on the road

First time I’m on an airplane in a long time (my last flight was a domestic Indian Anand-Delhi blitzrun more than a year ago when I unexpectedly needed a No Objection Certificate from the Dutch Embassy to obtain a visa for Pakistan, the first country to cross after leaving India on my way to the lowlands on an old motorcycle loaded with drums). Take-off will always be a miracle, the rest is as tedious as it ever was. The air host family is currently doing their dance of the trolleys – back and forth and back and forth and just when you think they’re ready to serve you that much-desired drink (any liquid would do fine at this point, when insides of noses have turned into brittle crusts), they back away to the other end of the tube again. The atmosphere is dry and hot, and I’m filled with anticipation of what will happen on the other side of air travel limbo. I’m on my way to Suleymaniyah, in Kurdish Iraq, to do an Elephant Songs project with local musicians and Iranians I met on my drumbiker trip last year. The adventure is commissioned by a Dutch NGO.

Though originally intended to celebrate no rouz, this part of the world’s new year celebration on 21 March, the festivities in Suleymaniyah proved a little more difficult to organise than expected. So much so that I lost some of the Iranian musicians I invited – clarinettist Rouzbeh whom I so pleasantly worked with last year, and santoor player Kayvan Farzin whom I was looking forward to meet both had to accept other gigs when the event dates remained unclear for months. (As it happens, Rouzbeh and his band Pallett will be in Europe while I’m in Iraq; with a bit of luck I’ll join them for a bit when I return.) In addition, two classical instrumentalists from Tehran I would have loved to have in the band couldn’t find a way to travel; they considered the overland border crossing too dangerous for female musicians.

My dear friends Arash and Kaveh however are on their way as I type this, so we’ll have a chance to continue where we left off after our fully improvised show at Amirali’s Parkingallery last year. We’ll be joined by bassist Ari Ali from Suleymaniyah and hopefully we’ll find one or two more musicians, as well as some people who’d like to join our percussion workshop. The final weeks of summer in Belgium I’ve been working on my Elephant Songbook, preparing melodies, grooves, improvisation instructions, development approaches. Asked the others to bring ideas as well, to create new music elephant song style: not finding the lowest common denominator but combining backgrounds, mixing and juxtaposing them. With all that done, this is the moment to let go of my plans and expectations and work with what we’ll turn out to have, to create an evening of fantastic music from what’s there. It seems the Bhagavad Gita forgot to mention <disclaimer> or maybe I just missed it </disclaimer> that apart from not worrying about the results of our work (our only duty is the work itself), it’s counterproductive to hold on to our expectations as well. So here’s to using preparation as a safety net only and being open to everything.

Touchdown in a few hours, no idea where I’ll sleep but all will be well. Looking forward to a week of music, nice weather, catching up with friends, reportedly good coffee at our rehearsal and concert venue Caffe 11. Once again travelling to play music. Curious & excited about the collaboration, the audience and their reactions, the artistic results. For those of you who won’t make it to Suleymaniyah on 10 October, I’ll post a 20 minute documentary some time in the week following the festivities. Stay tuned.

14 July 20127 February 2014

off with its head – again?!?

Riding through the hills around Kaleybar, in South Azerbayjan in the north of Iran, the hole-in-the-head-problem had clearly returned. The weld in the engine head, done in Tehran just a few weeks ago, had holes in various places. Uphill the bike was wheezing like an asthmatic donkey and demonstrated matching torque – a great way to burn a set of clutch plates. Starting was next to impossible, the engine simply didn’t have enough compression. Fortunately my new friend Masoud, taxi driver and tour guide, knew a mechanic in Abdel Razaq, 50 kilometres down the road to Jolfa, who would certainly be able to solve my problem.

The road was beautiful. Not much traffic, so I puffed my way through rolling hills and rocky mountains unbothered. I managed to attach the camera to my tankbag – a move of debatable merit as the video portrays me as a geriatric cripple who’s afraid of everything that is not flat and straight. You lose the joy of riding a little if anything that requires a bit of pick-up has to be done in first gear.

the road between kaleybar and abdel razaq * with original music

Recognising Abdel Razaq was easy enough – a few buildings around a curve in the road had motorbikes and enthousiastically waving people. Mister Nasr even spoke English. He looked at the bike for a second and blew my hopes of a quick fix and dito departure out of the window: off with its head! Again. But the process was quick, and a lot more confidently done than on a certain previous occasion.

Unfortunately, by the time the engine was in pieces, the electricity was gone. A mysterious phone call promised its return at 3 pm. It was 11:30 in the morning. No problem – my longer-than-planned stay in Kaleybar had eaten my money, so I hitch-hiked the 35 km to the nearest village with a bank. The journey didn’t take long, these people drive like maniacs. In a good way.
In the bank I was of course told they couldn’t change money, I’d have to go to Tabriz, a day’s travel away. I just hung out a bit, while more and more people gathered. Eventually I got what I needed, at an incredible exchange rate.
Sitting in the shade of a tree eating a lunch of bad crisps and worse cakes, I realised once again how happy I was, how easy everything actually was, or rather how perfectly allright. And how special. Now all I need to do is find out how to bring this attitude to bargaining with rickshaw drivers, asking directions, and thinking about my future.

After both I and the electricity had returned, the job of welding the holes was quickly done – only interrupted when a few men came in with an enormous tractor wheel with a cracked rim. While they poured water on it to keep the rubber (which was already patched with bolted-on bits of rubber) from melting or burning too badly, Nasr quickly finished the job. Then followed the usual bargaining, Iranian style: “no no, don’t pay me that much” “yes, please take it”. Repeated ad nauseam, these things usually end with one of the parties stuffing some notes in the other one’s pocket.

When everything was done, I started the engine with a satisfying roar and took off, waved goodbye by an enormous crowd of well-wishers that had materialised over the previous fifteen minutes. From 0 to 90 km/h in 100 metres! Or so it seemed. I don’t think the bike ever performed that well, except maybe in the Golden Days of Highway 76 in Rajasthan, last November, on my trip from Nepal to South India. Another reminder of those days were the herds of cows and goats on their way home.
I turned left when I met the Aras river, at Eskanlu, the golden late afternoon light casting my shadow ahead of me. The river, which forms the border with Azerbayjan and, later on, Armenia, grew to the width of a small lake while I was in a tunnel, and kept changing appearance after that. I was surprised how fast it flows.
Empty villages on the north bank in war-stricken Azerbayjan curiously fit in the landscape, as did the rusty barbed wire fence that lined long sections of the river.

The land was amazingly beautiful, but the signs that told us happy travellers to neither swim or take photographs limited my enthousiasm to document this ride. Most army checkpoints were empty, but some weren’t, and soldiers with binoculars scanned the road.
Another reason not to stop was that the beauty of the sky also indicated the coming darkness. Coming around a bend a little later, the sky was on fire – and then the sun dropped behind the horizon.

The road, severely damaged in places and covered with gravel in others, snaked through the mountains and it was very windy. While the sun disappeared, a thunderstorm started. At first, the lightning was horizontal, high up in the sky, then the lines, looking like cracks in an old wall also connected to the ground. No sound of thunder though, so it was far way – at least for now. A sign told me I had 25 kilometres to go, reminding me of how long the 25 km through rain and lightning in Lahore had felt – the cold, the darkness, the slippery road, the fallen trees on the road, the crash. Sometimes the road led to the right of the dark clouds, west toward the bit of light that wasn’t gone yet. At other times, the road aimed straight towards the streaky curtains of rain, making me wonder if I’d get soaked and maybe worse after all. Then, unexpectedly, I rode into a part of Jolfa that reminded me of shopping centres in mid-sized European dormitory towns – lots of square buildings selling poor quality versions of anything you could think of. I easily found the hotel I was looking for, and took my lugguge inside while the clouds burst into big tepid drops and the last light disappeared. I finished the day with two omelets (with tomato, as is the norm) and several cups of tea, chatting with the friendly proprietor and several Balochi Pakistanis that were staying there.

11 July 20127 February 2014

off with its head!

On my way from Esfahan to Tehran I noticed a New Sound in my bike.

Anyone who’s ever owned a mature bicycle knows what I’m talking about. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig describes how the engine of his “cycle” sounds like there’s a hand of loose change rolling around in it, but how he immediately recognises it when something is out of the ordinary. Your machine can make all the sounds in the world and may sound dreadful to others, but you know the way it sounds – if anything is different, you pay attention.
In this particular case, I first thought of the words of mechanic Farooq in Katmandu: “It will go away.” And it did: after a little while, the loud “clack” that accompanied every stroke of the engine disappeared. And came back a little while later.

At my next break, in the shadow of a magnificent antique Mack truck and my tea accompanied with a celebratory vermicelli icecream (yes, that tastes as strange as it sounds), I located the origin of the sound. The bush that the spark plug screws into, and which in turn is fixed into the engine head, was loose. Whether the “clack” was the bush rattling in the hole or the air that was forced out with each combustion I couldn’t tell, but that’s where the sound came from.

In Tehran, a friend took me to a mechanic that he hoped would know what to do with my bike – not too obvious in a country where any bike over 250 cc requires a hard-to-get permit. However, the ’80s Goldwing in the entrance of Uncle Ali’s workshop inspired trust, and the two Harleys he had stored there increased that trust, as did his enthousiasm. After trying to think of a way to fix the bike without opening the engine, he decided that the head would have to come off after all, and be sent to his favourite Armenian to rework the spark plug hole. After we took the head off we found out that the Armenian magician had left town for a few days, so the bike lived in Ali’s shop for what turned into a week before the head specialist returned.

When I came back after the work was finally done, it turned out he had done away with the bush altogether – he had welded the hole full, and drilled and threaded a new hole. We put the engine back together, and I took the bike out. Unfortunately, during a short testride on traffic-filled Shari’ati Street, the compression didn’t feel much better than before. When I asked him – with the help of a friendly fellow customer, as Uncle Ali does not speak English – he shrugged and said the engine would need a complete overhaul for the compression to improve, he just did what I had asked him to do. I didn’t even mention the gearbox which had turned unwilling – supposedly he hadn’t touched it so why would that be his fault? I didn’t feel like starting an argument about the little boys in the shop – and some of the big boys, too – who touch everything that can move, playing with switches, throttles, brakes, gears. Kick through all the gears of an unmoving bike a few times is a good way to traumatise a gearobx, but of course I had no way of proving anything, or even being sure myself. So trusting him and his reputation, I paid Uncle Ali his handsome fee and rode off, into the northern hills with a filmcrew to start to work on a documentary about an Iranian musician and myself meeting for a concert.

On my way from Meshgin Shahr to Kaleybar the week after, I noticed a New Sound in my bike.

8 July 20127 February 2014

elephant songs: ba1pa, on one leg

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.


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.

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.

5 July 20127 February 2014

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.

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.

27 June 20127 February 2014

elephant songs: pil ahang at darbast

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 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

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

11 June 201214 May 2014

elephant songs at parkingallery, tehran

In the summer of 1998, Amirali Ghasemi started the Parkingallery, an independent project space in a former garage in the north of Tehran (expanded in 2002 with an online gallery). One good Friday, at the opening of Amir Bastan‘s Worn Out Mirrors (Friday is Opening Day in Tehran), fellow percussionist Arash Lotfi informed me that we would perform in the space that coming Sunday. We asked oud player Kaveh Kamjou to join us, and, surrounded by Amir’s rorschach-art, we played an evening of improvisational music to a, given the short notice and no advertisement, surprsingly large crowd.

Our preparation for the show was a few hours of jamming in the afternoon, trying out different placements in the space. We worked on some tunes, grooves, improvisation ideas, and had another cup of tea before the audience started arriving. If I ever make a film out of the footage I collect on this trip, you’ll see that Arash also plays the ney beautifully. I can only wonder how he used to play the setar, before the accident that ruined one of his fingers, exactly three years ago these days.

One of the pieces was a percussion duo, featuring Arash on the lab chang, a Persian mouth harp.

4 June 20127 February 2014

kodum guri hasti?

Walking into my favourite coffeeshop Café Un the other day, I was told – with many apologies – that they were closed. But when I asked if I could stay and listen, three faces opened up into big smiles; I shook a round of hands and sat down to enjoy some lovely music on setar, daf, and tombak. Over the following days, setar-and-barman Sadegh introduced me to a lot of recordings of Persian traditional and fusion music while fixing me many espressos using his own custom blend of coffees, surrounded by coolly glamorous photographs of the likes of Bob Dylan, David Lynch, and Iranian artists whose names I haven’t even begun to manage to memorise yet. Even the ayatollahs look hip in grainy black-and-white.

Kodum guri hasti? Where the hell have you been? Riding around the desert for weeks, with burnt lips and sand up my nose, that’s where I’ve been. Very happy to be in a city again. Busy streets, a different smell on every corner – jasmin, kebabs, sewage, fresh bread, old sweat.
Kodum guri hasti? The expression comes to mind often when trying to navigate the city too. The literal translation is beautiful: which grave are you in? Apparently it’s quite rude. And so is the traffic – while in pedestrian life you may spend ten minutes waiting for each other to pass through a door, once they’re in their cars, Iranians are ruthless. Being in Tehran involves many hours of fighting through and getting lost in a vast network of highways – life doesn’t get much more urban than that. Especially enjoyable when driven around, Kurdish music drowning out the rattle of the airconditioning, by grinning Aylar, throwing the wheel around and dancing on the pedals like a ballerina driving a rollercoaster.

Just like the cafes move comfortably between Tom Waits and Alireza Ghorbani, historical and contemporary culture from all over the world inform cosmopolitan Iranian culture. At least at my, possibly naïve, first sight, there doesn’t seem to be a struggle for domination – whatever is useful, is used. Bad news for authenticist purists as well as for those who think western pop is the answer to everything, good news for all of us who just want to create and enjoy an interesting and interconnected life without worrying too much about the ideology of its backgrounds. And despite obvious problems, cultural life is diverse and thriving in Tehran – cafés, galleries, restaurants, parties. On one of my first days in the city, artist and independent curator Amirali Ghasemi whirlwinded me through a variety of North Tehrani galleries and then got me into an officially sold-out concert of Tehrani folk-fusion heroes Pallett.

Kodum guri hasti? Wherever I was, it wasn’t on a concert stage and I’ve been missing it. I guess it’s what happens when you decide to travel from South Asia to North West Europe on an ancient tractor, these things tend to take time. But I’m happy to have some playing opportunities here again. I had the joy to play a nice concert at Amirali’s Parkingallery last Sunday (videos will be up soon), and am currently preparing two evenings of music at Darbast at the Mohsen Gallery next week, involving the Pallettis and Soheil from the video below, among others. Of the many informal playing sessions at people’s homes, the one at the house of musician & film composer Ali Samadpour and visual artist Negar Farajiani was a particularly enjoyable example – a great night of eating, playing, drinking, talking.

dinner music meeting with ali samadpour & family, amirali ghasemi, soheil peyghambari, martin shamoonpour, aida khorsandi, and robbert van hulzen (4 june)

Tag: iran

elephant songs in suleymaniyah