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Dji­van Gasparyan

Hos­sein Alizadeh

This quite beau­ti­ful album of slow-paced, deeply roman­tic music com­bines the vir­tu­os­i­ty of Dji­van Gas­paryan, the ven­er­a­ble mas­ter of the Armen­ian duduk, and Hos­sein Alizadeh, the super­star of the Per­sian tar. The duduk is a nine-holed oboe made of apri­cot wood, some­what resem­bling the medieval Euro­pean shawm, and Gas­paryan is its unri­valed mas­ter. Alizadeh is the younger dynamo of the Per­sian lute. How­ev­er, for this amaz­ing per­for­mance record­ed in Tehran in Sep­tem­ber of 2003, Alizadeh employed a vari­ant form of the tar known as the shu­ran­giz. The con­cert alter­nat­ed Armen­ian and Per­sian songs, and includ­ed Alizadeh’s famil­iar orches­tra, and three vocal­ists — one female, some­thing con­sid­ered a bit dar­ing in con­tem­po­rary, mul­lah-infest­ed Iran. Iran and the Unit­ed States share a com­mon afflic­tion: both are nations with a deep and mul­ti­fac­eted musi­cal her­itage, and an innate vital­i­ty of pop­u­lar cul­ture, which have the mis­for­tune of being ruled by wicked, igno­rant, stu­pid old men, and tor­ment­ed by moron­ic reli­gious zealots. Yet the under­ly­ing vital­i­ty and beau­ty always seems to sur­vive. Relax with a book of verse, a cup of wine, and any agree­able thou at your dis­pos­al, and put on this album.