Postscript January 6, 2016: "Paul Bley, a jazz pianist whose thoughtful but intuitive commitment to advanced improvisation became widely influential, died of natural causes Sunday. He was 83."
What I hear in jazz takes on Persia, aka Iran, is like Montesquieu's Persian Letters in reverse. If Persian Letters was composed of letters exchanged between two imaginary Persian noblemen traveling in Europe, jazz pieces about Persia are like composers' and musicians' mind journeys in Persia. As Montesquieu would say, you might find in jazz compositions about Iran "a sort of romance, without having expected it."
In the Jazz Mirrors Iran series, several different musicians and pieces introduced and they were all connected together by a sort of a chain. The chain was Persia, a dream land where even the traffic can be (pictured) as harmonious. (see Gulda)
Back to Montesquieu's concept of an imaginary encounter between east (Iran) and west (Europe), the author talks about how the travelers (in this case, musicians) were struck with the marvellous and extraordinary, each in his own style. "Reasoning cannot be intermixed with the story," remarks Montesquieu, "because the personages not being brought together to reason." Therefore, Fats Waller's Persian Rug or Lloyd Miller's Pari Ruu are always "connected with a manifestation of surprise, or astonishment, and not with the idea of inquiry, much less with that of criticism." That is the Iran I hear and see in jazz.
