Jazz Mirrors Iran#9: Persian Village

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.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#8: In a Persian Market

The whole color spectrum reflected in tasbihs, hanging from the shop windows. The smell of rosewater perfumes. Carpets and rugs piled inside doorless, windowless shops and a carney-like salesman shouting outside, encouraging curious pedestrians to go in and see the “best.” Kebab shops, sending the smell of rice and meat to the air, next to a fabric shop that no lady can resist stopping by and bargaining with the humorous, assured salesman. This is the daily scene in the bazaar of Mashhad (where I lived most of my life), Grand Bazaar of Tehran, or the dream-like Vakil Bazaar of Shiraz, a Persian market somewhere in Iran where its colors, noises, smells and movements are uniquely inspiring for any poet, musician, filmmaker and anyone interested in turning the sights and sounds of the daily street life into a piece of art. [above photo: ceiling of a bazaar in Iran. Photography by Reza Hakimi.]

Now, the jazz connection, or rather the story of a song: The story begins in England, where the Birmingham born son of an engraver, Albert Ketèlbey (1875-1959) wrote this week’s theme tune, In a Persian Market. In 1920, Ketèlbey, a busy composer in London’s West End music halls, probably without ever being to a Persian market, used his imagination to depict a busy day in a Persian bazaar. His compositions soon became a popular hit, recycled many times, and even found its way to the jazz songbook.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#7: Jazz, the Samarkand Way

If you’re a jazz aficionado, you’ll immediately assume from the cool sound of contra-bass, clarinet-bass and brushed drums that the played track [here] is a west coast jazz from the mid 1950s. The carefully established musical textures and easy-going swing of the piece with some nice urban colorizations only make you more sure.

But take a look at the album cover and you’ll see every guess, except maybe the date, is wrong. Hard to believe, but what you’re listening to is a track by Aminollah Hussein, or André Hossein, the French-Iranian composer, famous enough in France for being the father to the French movie star and director, Robert Hossein.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#6: Paraded Beauty

Women in Iran: a hot topic, no matter how you look at it, from European feminists studying the country to Iranian men sipping cups of “smuggled” Starbucks coffee while cruising up Tehran’s Jam Avenue. Whatever helps to glamorize these young ladies on the streets comes to their service: heavy make-up, flamboyant haircuts which under the veil turns the head into a piece of early Cubist art, bold colors that remind one of Gauguin in Martinique, tight dresses that generously exhibit the female figure, high heels and leather boots that make the infamous Betty Page look like a modest housewife - cigarette smokers, driving behind the wheel of expensive sport cars in northern Tehran, listening to loud music - patrons of Tehran’s reputation as the nose job capital of the world, as if all Persian girls rival themselves with Nicole Kidman in how properly whittled noses should look.

photo by Reza Hakimi

Art and culture aside, what impresses Western visitors in Iran are these apparent dichotomies of beauty and street fashion, all the more exotic to foreign eyes as defiance within the stringent rules of the Islamic Republic regime. “Women are so chic there,” Mark Cousins, an Irish filmmaker told me one time while making a documentary in Iran, “it’s like a European country, but a strange kind of Europe.”

Pari Ruu, Lloyd Miller and the Heliocentrics

Jazz Mirrors Iran#5: Strictly for the Persians

For my fifth installment in Jazz Mirrors Iran, I'll look at a tune from a third country in which the secretive consociation between the American art form and Persian culture took place: France.


If you were in Paris during the cold winter of 1941, walking by the Seine and watching the German barracks, you could whistle a beautiful tune by Alix Combelle Orchestra, a song ironically called Strictement pour les Persans, or in English, Strictly for the Persians. 

Strictement Pour Les Persans (Strictly for Persians) - Alix Combelle Orchestra

Paris’ underground resistance did not stay paralyzed for too long. To write the French off as cowards or conceding would be dismissive and inaccurate. A Parisian writer at the time was “incapable of surviving for long hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print,” silenced essayist Jean Guehenno observed. “He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him.” Satre himself had stated that artists and writers had a duty to tell the rest of France “not to be ruled by Germans.”

We all know that jazz played a significant role in uniting African-Americans under the oppressive Jim Crow laws. In Paris of 1941, even as a borrowed art form, it still manifested the self-empowerment to create a nationalistic identity at a point where the country was already fractured into rubble. Before the Nazi invasion of France, when news of an eventual war reached Paris, many African-American expatriate musicians left to return to the United States. Their sudden departure left the active French jazz scene on its own, and club owners found themselves without any entertainers or live music to supply the demand of tasteful customers.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#4: An American in Tehran

photo by Reza Hakimi

In the fourth installment of my ten-week series exploring Iran through the world of jazz, I've looked at Iranian music through the melodies of one its most dedicated ambassadors: Lloyd Miller.

Lloyd Miller is no typical fan boy. If there’s one thing to know about him, it’s that he doesn’t like mainstream music, likely most of the stuff on your iPod. Groupie he is not, calling most of today’s new hits “jumpy ugly obnoxious rock junk that has permeated the whole world like leprosy destroying everyone’s musical tastes and minds.” You could write him off as an aging music snob, but then you’d be missing out on one of the edgiest pioneers in building the musical bridge between East and West.

                                  Segah – Lloyd Miller                                 

If there’s a more important thing to know about Lloyd Miller, it’s his love of Persian music. Born in 1938 to a ballet dancer and a professional clarinetist, he began learning piano at the age of three. By his early teens, he taught himself banjo, clarinet and cornet. There is scarcely a single instrument today that he hasn’t mastered or at least experimented. In 1957 his father, now a professor at the University of Southern California, was invited to Iran in order to oversee the creation of University of Tehran’s business school. Nineteen-year-old Lloyd, already a staple in the American jazz scene, came along, mostly so that his parents could keep him away from a drug culture that permeated into many music circles. Miller himself looked at the trip as a spiritual quest, searching for a new musical language that he found partially in traditional jazz and the more modern Bop, but still felt incomplete.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#3: Iranic

Vank Cathedral in Iran [photo by Reza Hakiminejad]

Two weeks ago I began a ten-week series (that now I might extend it to 12!) exploring jazz that reflects a part of Iran, both as an actual place on the map and as a pure creation of art. This is Iran according to American and European jazz musicians of the 20th century. In the third installment, I look at the "ironies" shared between a culture and a musical form.

From the Shahs of Sunset to the Mullahs of Qom, Iran stands a Catch-22 waddling to find its way between Bravo and Basij, Marxist and Muslim, youth and establishment, sincerity and tar’ruf. Sound confusing? Welcome to Irani irony, a culture where expectations are implied but never stated, perhaps the only one where you’ll find yourself politely chastised. To navigate in it is an improvisational act of its own, an interplay where actions depend on relational anticipation. This is the game of Persian life.

.                         Iranic by Jimmy Giuffre                        .        

The emergence of free-form jazz in the 1950s, pioneered amongst others by composer and multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Giuffre, was no less a paradox than the musical form's emergence itself, challenging the limitations of established bebop, hard bop and modal, breaking down standards that characterized traditional jazz. Where bebop treated musicians as interpreters, free jazz placed them at the forefront as the tune's dominant voice. Framework from jazz charts gave way to improvisation. Professionals, in their experimentation came off to the naked ear as amateurish, as if they were students doing their best to sound good. Not so confident to play constantly and seamlessly, they pause, wait, look at each other, and think deeply for what they should play for the next chorus.

Jazz Mirrors Iran#2: Persian Rug

Last week, I began a ten-week series exploring jazz that reflects a part of Iran, both as an actual place on the map and as a pure creation of art. This is Iran according to American and European artists of the 20th century. It is also the same country that makes daily headlines in the news, yet it is music that brings it a far greater truth than any pundit on a TV screen. In the second installment of this ten-week series exploring Iran through the world of jazz, let's gaze our eyes down to the magnificent floor coverings that inspired the classic jazz standard tune.

Iran as a country has long been a contested commodity in the modern era, its politics so pervasive, hardly a piece of artwork makes it abroad without some sort of oppositional branding -- the mere fact that it comes from Iran automatically makes it a piece of creative dissidence. The one medium that manages to evade any type of political baggage is not the artwork we hang on our walls, but the adorned canvas we lay out on our floors --Persia’s rugs. Like Iran’s version of Wall Street, these carpets, often called an Iranian’s stock or share, are more than a hypnosis of vivid colors and mesmerizing patterns: they’re a woven record of a country and civilization dating back over 2,500 years, and for most Iranians, a first encounter with the visual blueprints that we come to associate as art.

Three versions of Persian Rug which I'm going to discuss later

Jazz Mirrors Iran#1: Tehran

photo by Reza Hakiminejad

Imagine this: A tenor saxophone and bass mimic in sound the pace of rush hour walkers. A trumpet, sounding like a car horn, pops in and out, pulsating along with the beat of the drummer, whose brushes on the snare create an interplay that brings to life the image of a bustling urban city.

No cobblestone streets or the smell of Parisian bread; no green leaves overhanging narrow passageways or the sound of French in the background. This is not Europe. It’s Iran that is being depicted in cool jazz tones.

Each Monday for the next ten weeks I will feature a jazz tune that reflects a part of Iran, both as an actual place on the map and as a pure creation of art. This is Iran according to American (or non-American) artists in the 20th century. It is the same country that makes daily news headlines, but thanks to the masters of misinformation in the media, the more that is heard, the less that is learned.

                           Teheran- Friedrich Gulda                              

Tehran, sometimes spelled in French or German as Teheran, is a metropolis of 8.5 million people and the capital city of Iran. Witnessing many changes in the past 150 years, it was, and still is, a gigantic mechanism dealing with endless urban issues. Tehranis, sharp and open, and culturally closer to the people of those capital cities of the Eastern Europe, have two simultaneous battles to fight: one, to find a way out of the maddening traffic of the highways and streets of Tehran, and then, to find ways of expressing their social and political dissatisfaction in some creative and subversive ways.

Jazz Mirrors Iran

Happy Nowruz to Iranian Readers! Peace to you!

Iran-- sometimes known as Persia, with an echo of 1001 Nights and dreamy cities of wine and poetry. As a name, a real place or an imaginary land from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, to the media propaganda of the recent months about nuclear developments, sanctions and military action, it remains a country held victim to misrepresentation and lazy awareness.

It is very much the same ignorance that for centuries silenced African-American artists and communities, who developed jazz as the art form to revise the human condition and to remove the barriers between “us” and “them” in a democratic language that knew no boundaries. Jazz, as the art that fights against various types of segregation, could be a myth itself. But the myth of jazz as something for all human beings, regardless of race, nationality, gender and age is so strong that it can still feed our desire to explore and to change.

In the coming weeks, I'll write about ten pieces of jazz music (specially designed to welcome the arrival of spring and Nowruz, Iranian New Year), presented on Aslan Media, about or influenced by Iran.