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“Kayhan Kalhor’s music speaks from an ancient Persian tradition while sounding timeless and spiritually invigorating today.”

StringS magazine

“Brooklyn Rider is a gifted string quartet that mixes the classics with the contemporary to create music that is emotionally exhilarating and intellectually stimulating.”

LuCid CuLture

“Kayhan Kalhor is having a hard time doing anything wrong right now: pretty much every-thing the renowned Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) player touches turns into something magical. Like most of his contemporaries, Kalhor delights in cross-cultural collaboration, and this latest cd, created with inventive string quartet Brooklyn Rider is typical. Brisk, bracing, exhilarating and often wrenchingly haunting, it’s a spectacularly successful achievement.”

BROOKLYN RIDERKayhan Kalhor

&PRESS

A MAster IrAnIAn MusIcIAn PlAys culturAl AMbAssAdor

August 27, 2008 • The New York Times • BY VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

In “Silent City,” a hypnotic work commemorating Halabjah, a Kurdish village annihilated by Saddam Hussein, the kamancheh, an upright four-stringed Persian fiddle, breaks out in a lamenting wail based on a traditional Turkish melody.

“Silent City” is included on a new disc of the same name on the World Village label, which Kayhan Kalhor, a vir-tuoso kamancheh player, recorded with the young string quartet Brooklyn Rider.

The work opens with a desolate murmuring improvised by the strings, eerily evoking the swirling dust of barren ruins, with a Kurdish melody heralding the rebuilding of the destroyed village. It has a particular resonance for Mr.

Kalhor, 45, who was born in Tehran to a family of Kurdish descent. The sound of the kamancheh is “warm and very close to the human voice,” he said by phone from Tehran, where he now lives.

He began studying the kamancheh at 7 and playing with Iran’s National Orchestra of Radio and Television at 13. He left the country after the Islamic Revolution (when universities were closed for several years) and lived in several Western countries, including Canada, where he studied music composition at Carleton University in Ottawa. His main motivation for leaving Iran was not political, he said; it was to further his musical studies.

Mr. Kalhor met members of Brooklyn Rider in 2000 at Tanglewood, where they took part in the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. The quartet’s members are Colin Jacobsen and Jonathan Gandelsman, violinists; Nicholas Cords, violist; and Eric Jacobsen, cellist.

“Silent City” is the result of eight years of learning and experimentation, Mr. Cords said. “We enjoyed each other on first meeting and were fascinated with his world, but at the beginning wouldn’t have dreamed of making this recording together.”

The beginning of “Silent City” is improvised, a skill that is integral to the Persian classical music tradition, in which performers base their extemporizing on a collection of melodies and motifs known as the Radif. Western classical musicians rarely improvise, but Brooklyn Rider honed its skills with Mr. Kalhor; Mr. Cords and Colin Jacobsen received further instruction while visiting Iran in 2004. “The improvisation feels like an outgrowth of our friendship,” Mr. Cords said.

The men of Brooklyn Rider also had to learn how to adapt to playing the quarter tones and modes common in Middle Eastern music.

Mr. Kalhor is well versed in cross-cultural partnerships. His many successful musical collaborations include Ghazal, a duo with the Indian sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan. The sitar and kamancheh work well together, Mr. Kalhor said, largely because of the “affinity of the two cultures” and their many historical connections.

He has also performed with the New York Philharmonic and at the Mostly Mozart Festival. On Oct. 18 he will appear at Carnegie Hall. He said he rarely performed in Iran because of the bureaucracy involved in organizing a concert.

Mr. Kalhor, who has incorporated techniques like pizzicatos (not traditionally performed on the kamancheh) into his music, insists on a deep understanding of the musical cultures he works with. “Nowadays with a lot of musical collaborations and fusion music, it’s obvious that the performers really don’t know each other’s culture,” he said.

Sometimes, he added, “I think the producers just put four different guys from different cultures in a studio and want them to jam. This is not going to be my approach.”

As an Iranian musician who frequently performs for Western audiences, Mr. Kalhor, who has lived in New York (he returned to Tehran in 2003), said that he inevitably faced political questions. But he stressed that he was a cultural ambassador, not a politician. “We are always in the middle of politics,” he said, laughing. “We go to a concert and boom, a political question about the government, about the presi-dent, etc.”

For that reason, his ensemble with the celebrated Iranian singer Muhammad Reza Shajarian, the singer Homayoun Shajarian and the lute player Hussein Alizadeh is called the Masters of Persian Music, not Iranian Music. “For political reasons, I think we didn’t want people to think it has anything to do with today’s politics of Iran or the U.S. or any culture for that matter,” Mr. Kalhor explained, adding that the culture of Persia (which was renamed Iran in 1935) goes back much further. “When we say Persian we don’t mean today’s Iranian borders.”

Traditional Persian melodies inspire much of “Silent City,” a recording, whose pieces are composed and arranged by Mr. Kalhor, Colin Jacobsen, the violist Ljova and the Iranian santur player Siamak Aghaei. The bassist Jeffrey Beecher, the percussionist Mark Suter and Mr. Aghaei also perform.

The disc opens with “Ascending Bird,” based on a melody (inspired by a mythical tale of a bird trying to fly to the sun) that Mr. Cords and Mr. Jacobsen heard while visiting Iran. It begins with melancholy whispers of melody before exploding into an ecstatic frenzy.

“Parvaz” (Persian for flight), which also explores the soaring-bird theme, features Mr. Kalhor playing the setar (a four-stringed, long-necked wooden Iranian lute), whose bright, jangly line dances with restless fervor above the other strings.

The disc closes with “Beloved, do not let me be discouraged,” whose title is taken from a poem by a 16th-century Turkish writer about ill-fated lovers — an evocative blend of courtly medieval Italian music filtered through a Middle Eastern prism.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

ABC Australia October 4, 2008

Review: Silent City BY DOUG SPENCER

The relevant ‘f’’ word fits more failures (some, well-intentioned, others exploitative) than musical successes. Silent

City is, however, a brilliant example of ‘fusion’. Its makers have direct experience of both their very different home-

places: Iran and the USA. Persian classical music has a longer history than the Western kind. Kayhan Kalhor is one of

the most eloquent players of any violin species. He is the supreme exponent of the kamancheh. Brooklyn Rider is a

New York- based string quartet. They met as members of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. Equally apropos are all these

words: new, ancient, refined, earthy, composed, improvisatory, surprising, lucid. The key word is ‘beautiful’.

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider

eMusic September 23, 2008

CD Review: Silent City

You can justifiably call this cross-cultural effort a spinoff of Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. The string quartet with the

quixotic name Brooklyn Rider consists of musicians who first met each other, and Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor,

while working in Ma's globetrotting world/chamber music ensemble. Kalhor is a master of the kamancheh, the spike

fiddle of Persian classical music, and has become a primary composer for the Silk Road albums. On "Silent City" he

and his Brooklyn-based colleagues draw freely on their shared loves of traditional Central Asian music and

improvisation - which sounds like a recipe for a mushy, politically correct album of Classical Lite. Instead, the album

sounds like the next step in an evolution that comes from the tradition of Béla Bartók, who tramped around the

Hungarian and Romanian countryside in the early 20th century, recording folk songs and dances and incorporating

them into his own string pieces.

In addition to the bowed Western and Persian strings, "Silent City" also features bass and percussion, and the

combination is used to good effect on the opening cut, "Ascending Bird," an exotic yet accessible work that wouldn't

disappoint fans of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." Each of the four tracks offers something slightly different, from the

haunted introspection of the title track, to the plucked sounds of the Iranian setar (a lute that is the ancestor of India's

sitar) on "Parvaz," to the gradually building, almost trance-like ecstasy of the epic "Beloved, do not let me be

discouraged." It's not Persian classical music, and you could reasonably ask if it's Western classical music either - but

part of Brooklyn Rider's mission seems to be to suggest that we redefine what "Western classical music" means in the

21st century.

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider

New Jersey Star Ledger September 23, 2008

Review: Silent City BY BRADLEY BAMBARGER

"Silent City" Kayhan Kalhor, kamancheh/setar; Brooklyn Rider; Siamak

Aghaei, santur; Jeff Beecher, double-bass; Mark Suter, percussion

(World Village) FOUR STARS

Kayhan Kalhor, 45, is an Iranian composer and virtuoso of the kamancheh, a Persian upright fiddle with a crying,

human sound. A key member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, Kalhor prefigured Ma's cross-cultural ideals with his

Indo-Persian duo Ghazal. This engrossing disc sees him collaborate with the young string quartet Brooklyn Rider, its

members also Silk Road veterans.

The album opens with a dramatic arrangement of the Persian traditional "Ascending Bird," the timbres of the Eastern

and Western strings weaving together beautifully (and caught ideally by the recording, made in a New Jersey studio).

The centerpiece is Kalhor's 29-minute "The Silent City," an intense lament for the Kurdish village of Halabja in Iraq,

where Sadaam Hussein killed 5,000 with chemical weapons. This studio version is longer and more atmospheric than

the previous Silk Road live recording, although the emotion still builds like an Eastern version of Barber's Adagio.

Kalhor switches to the lute-like setar for the mysterious "Parvaz," while Brooklyn Rider's Colin Jacobsen contributes a

piece that blends the Middle East with the medieval West: "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged," an epic,

hypnotic instrumental love song.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

Charleston Gazette September 18, 2008

Review: Silent City BY MICHAEL LIPTON

In a time when we are being conditioned to fear people — especially those from non-Western countries — cross-

cultural musical collaborations are more important than ever. New York’s experimental string quartet Brooklyn Rider

and Iranian musician/composer Kayhan Kalhor have created a stunning CD that infuses an avant-garde string quartet

into the wild and modal sounds of Persian music. More than a studio collaboration, “Silent City” is the result of nearly

a decade of learning and experimentation with BR’s members traveling to Iran to delve deep into the subtleties and

complexities of Persian music.

The opening track, “Ascending Bird,” is a driving, rhythmic and intense piece based on an ancient tale of a bird that

flies too close to the sun. A good introduction, it showcases the full depth of the quartet, a sweeping melody and

intricate percussion work. “Parvaz” features Kalhor on kamancheh and setar (spike fiddle and wooden lute) with the

string quartet providing accents and rhythmic accompaniment. The title track is a 30-minute reflection on Halabja, the

Kurdish Iraq city that Saddam Hussein’s forces attacked with chemical weapons in 1988. It builds almost

imperceptibly, employing drones, volume swells and dissonance to achieve a beautifully eerie mix of sadness and

grandeur. Midway through, the crescendo suddenly halts and the piece begins again — much like the city after the

attack. Heavy stuff.

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider

Lucid Culture September 9, 2008

CD Review: Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider- Silent City

Kayhan Kalhor is having a hard time doing anything wrong right now: pretty much everything the renowned Iranian

kamancheh (spike fiddle) player touches turns into something magical. Like most of his contemporaries, Kalhor

delights in cross-cultural collaboration, and this latest cd, created with inventive string quartet Brooklyn Rider is

typical. Brisk, bracing, exhilarating and often wrenchingly haunting, it’s a spectacularly successful achievement. It’s

less an attempt to blend East and West than simply a collaboration between friends. Kalhor – founder of the Dastan

Ensemble, Ghazal Ensemble and Masters of Persian Music - has two lengthy compositions here, playing kamancheh

and also santur (a four-string lute) on his own darkly rustling retelling of the Persian flight myth, Parvaz. Fascinatingly

arranged by maverick violist/composer Ljova, its recurrent refrains slowly builds, inexorably gaining intensity..

The cd opens with a vividly evocative traditional piece, Ascending Bird, an imaginative musical rendition of the same

myth that Kalhor explores in Parvaz. The piece begins with the strings bristling with anticipation and urgency before

taking flight over the rapidfire strumming of guest setarist Siamak Aghaei. At this point, for all intents and purposes, it

becomes a rapidly, fascinatingly shapeshifting acoustic rock song. The album’s centerpiece is its title track, a Kalhor

composition, perhaps the most intense and emotionally wrenching work he’s written to date. It’s a dead-accurate

portrayal of the aftereffects of shock on the human psyche. An evocation of Saddam Hussein’s poison gas attack on the

Kurdish city of Hallabjah, it begins almost inaudible with a faint hum that only gradually grows into a wash of numb

atmospherics. Slowly, the city’s residents make their way back, piecing together whatever may be left of their families,

their lives and their memories. Running their instruments through a delay effect, both individually and in unison, the

group create a hypnotic, echoey, otherworldly ambience that goes on for minutes on end: this is a long piece, clocking

in at around thirty minutes. Only at the end does the melody erupt in raw outrage, and when it does, it ranks with

Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, Julius Reubke’s Sonata on the 49th Psalm or Elvis Costello at his most excoriating

as a potent expression of despair followed by fury. Even if it is much quieter.

The cd’s final piece Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged begins stately and atmospherically before growing to a

lively dance with what could be an attractively major-key pre-baroque English folk melody rearranged for strings:

Henry Purcell, anyone? Based on a 16th century verse by the Turkish poet Fuzuli, its theme is crazy love: interestingly,

while the players attack the melody with considerable abandon, it never gets completely out of control.

Perhaps because of the diversity of the performers’ backgrounds, this cd sounds neither particularly Middle Eastern nor

American. Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider just might have created a a new genre here: dark ambient modernist Persian-

American classical, for lack of a better term. It’s accessible enough to appeal to mainstream classical fans, although

more adventurous listeners will undoubtedly spin this over and over. To completely appreciate it, headphones are an

absolute necessity. Without a doubt, one of the most enjoyably pioneering cds of the decade.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider Spinner.com • September 2, 2008

Giving Voice to ‘Silent City’: Kayhan Kalhor Bridges Tehran and Brooklyn BY STEVE HOCHMAN There are several intriguing angles one could take regarding 'Silent City,' a new album combining the talents of Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor with the adventurous American string quartet Brooklyn Rider. An outgrowth of the musicians' experience as part of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble recordings and tours, this album comes at

a time of ever-increasing tensions and rhetoric between the two countries' governments, a time when suspicion seems to trump reason and a time when more and more artists are seen as ambassadors of their cultures. And the title piece is emotionally stunning, a 29-minute musical Guernica, a threnody for the Kurdish village Hallabja that suffered the 1988 chemical weapons attack by Iraq that left 5,000 dead.

But don't overlook one striking thing about the contents of this album, particularly that title composition: This is

simply utterly remarkable music.

This is not a case of Persian styles adorned with Western strings, or conversely a string quartet with Iranian

music on top of it. Much like compositions of fellow Tehran native Hafez Nazeri discussed in an earlier Around

the World column, this is a true fusion. And it's not just a melding of of cultures and genres but of the musical

minds of the people making it -- which is exactly what Kalhor intended when he conceived the piece.

"I think the best part of any musical encounter is the thinking stage," he says. "Let me give an example: You

listen to a great African musician. You enjoy the music and suddenly you think of what you can do with him or

her in a musical collaboration. This happens to me a lot. I hear a great piece of music somewhere and would

love to picture myself in it! What can I add to it to make it different if I was given the opportunity? Not that it

should be different."

That, he says, was the case with such groundbreaking collaborations as Ghazal (with Indian sitar player

Shujaat Husain Khan), Masters of Persian Music (with vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram

Nazeri and tar master Hossein Alizadeh), his 2004 'In the Mirror of the Sky' album (with Kurdish lute player Ali

Akbar Moradi) and a featured role on the Kronos Quartet's album 'Caravan.'

Brooklyn Rider Spinner.com • September 2, 2008 page 2 of 3 "The biggest challenge in these cases is to learn about that certain kind of music or musical culture and the

next is how to combine the ideas, technically and sentimentally," he notes.

This was different, though, both on the title piece and on the three others surrounding it: 'Ascending Bird'

(based on a traditional Persian tune and arranged by Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen and guest santur player

Siamak Aghaei), 'Parvaz' (a 2000 composition by Kalhor) and 'Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged'

(written by Jacobsen, inspired in part by the medieval Persian romantic tale 'Layla and Majnun').

"With Brooklyn Rider, I didn't really have to picture myself in the music. We had played many pieces together,

by different composers, and they knew my music better than other musicians I had worked with." Which

means the "thinking stage" of this was a little different than he had experienced, with an element of freedom

he'd never really had before.

"After playing together for a long time, I think one of the elements that we were after was the use of freedom

and improvisation," he says of arranging the music for him and Brooklyn Rider, supplemented by bass player

Jeff Beecher and percussionist Mark Suter. "How to bring that to a piece played by an ensemble of six players

and not make it chaotic was the question. I'm not very keen on jamming without direction, so I tried to find one

and explain it to the others. And for even more direction, I decided to finish the piece with a pre-written --

totally arranged -- movement to bring everything together. To me, the piece is like a story, and it has a certain

ending, which was very intentional."

And that means, to him, that he came up with something that on one hand is specific to the musicians

involved, but on the other transcends even that -- something that is designed to have a life in other settings.

This, in fact, is not the first presentation of it. It was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and debuted at

Tanglewood Music Center in 2006 with Kahlor leading an eight-piece string ensemble in a 20-minute version,

as can be heard and downloaded here. But the Brooklyn Rider version takes the ideas to new places, and

even more expansion of the ideas is to be expected in the shows the musicians will be doing in the U.S. next

spring, following the Silk Road Ensemble appearance Sept. 27 at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring Kalhor.

"The personality and deep understanding of the players made this particular recording very special, although

it could also be approached by other instrumentalists if explained well," he says. "For me, 'Silent City' is an

idea more than a piece, and that idea can be used in many formats with many other combinations."

Brooklyn Rider Spinner.com • September 2, 2008 page 3 of 3 And that, arguably, is where the art and craft of this piece meets the emotions behind and evoked by it. Not

only does the music work in different combinations of players, but it also works for a great variety of listeners.

Kalhor wrote it about a very specific occurrence but has encountered people from different places, who

endured different situations yet found great personal resonance in this music.

"As humans, we share many similarities in our lives: death, catastrophe, injustice, unhappiness, aggression

and wars at one side, and happiness, friends, kindness, love and peace at the other," he says. "All are

emotions we feel and will greatly be affected by. I don't think it's hard for a person from New Orleans to relate

and understand the suffering of an Iraqi or an Afghan or a Rwandan, or vice versa. They might be from

different cultures, but to lose a loved one -- to accident or human aggression or a wrong decision or political

difficulty -- is the same everywhere. Unfortunately, many social, political, racial factors are trying to separate

us as humans. But I think at the end of the day and despite all of the negative propaganda, we remain

humans and would unfortunately remember it most when something terrible happens."

Do not take this as a political statement, though, a commentary against -- or for -- the Iranian government or

U.S. policy or any such thing.

"My personal goal and wish is to make people realize that a citizen of any country does not represent their

politicians, nor should they," Kahlor insists. "And to say that musicians are cultural ambassadors of any

culture, not the political one. I come from an old culture that has offered many values to the human society,

and I want to share that with everyone through music.

"Unfortunately, most of the time I have to get engaged in political discussion with friends or reporters about

the political situation in Iran or the relationship between our governments -- not our countries -- and the

images that the Western media depicts from today's Iran does not really help me make my points."

Make what you will of it, then. Or make nothing of it, and simply enjoy it for what it is: great music.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider The Scotsman • August 30, 2008

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider: Silent City BY MICHAEL CHURCH The city explicitly referred to is the Kurdish village of Halabja, which Saddam Hussein half exterminated, but we are

meant to take it as meaning all the cities throughout history that have been destroyed, either by human actions or by

natural disaster.

The group performing this work has a fascinating provenance, in that they were first brought together by globe-trotting

cellist Yo-Yo Ma as part of his Silk Road Project. Kalhor is a virtuoso on the kemancheh spike-fiddle, and spends more

of his time in New York than in his native Iran, and he's become a tireless innovator and composer for combinations of

Eastern and Western musicians.

With a string quartet plus a percussionist setting off the kemancheh, the sound-world of this work is subtle; its

alternation between furious energy and slow-moving harmonic shifts makes for an emotionally powerful hour.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

Strings Magazine August 14, 2008

CD Review: Spins of the Week BY GREG CAHILL

Passport (In a Circle 001) by Brooklyn Rider

Silent City (World Village 468078) by Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider

Reminiscent of the more established but no less adventurous Turtle Island and Kronos quartets, Brooklyn Rider is a

gifted string quartet that mixes the classics with the contemporary to create music that is emotionally exhilarating and

intellectually stimulating. The quartet—Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric

Jacobsen, cello—is capable of creating a lush reading of Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor one moment and an

electrifying chamber-jazz spin on rock en español experimentalists Café Tacuba the next. That latter tune, “La Muerte

Chiquita,” arranged by contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, appears on Passport, one of the year’s best

chamber-music recordings. It is matched by five scintillating arrangements of Armenian folk songs, a pair of songs by

the Russian violist and composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, and a single original composition by Brooklyn Rider violinist

Colin Jacobsen. This is some of the most vibrant music I’ve heard this year, of any genre, and it arrives from a group

that’s been waiting in the wings for a few years. The notion that Brooklyn Rider has arrived is supported by the

simultaneous release of Silent City, their stunning collaboration with Kurdish-Iranian kamancheh, or spike-fiddle,

master Kayhan Kalhor. The group’s rich timbre and ability to handle the demands of Kahlor’s portamento-laden

Persian modes and shifting tempos makes this challenging music a real thrill ride. Obviously, the group’s longtime

association with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble (they’ve participated in three Sony Classical recordings with that

ensemble) has helped prepare the Brooklyn Rider for this stunning world-music summit meeting.

Highly recommended.

Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider

eMusic October 25, 2008

CD Review: Passport BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON

Those of us who remember when portable music meant a shoulder-mounted boom box might also recall a time when

the Kronos Quartet were the only string quartet to play music from territories west of Los Angeles, east of the Volga or

south of the Mediterranean. The machines have shrunk, but string quartets have expanded their territory. Today's young

ensembles don't even need to plunge into global internationalism; they've grown out of it. The string quartet Brooklyn

Rider came together for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, so its interests lie well beyond the borough. Its first recording

was Silent City, a bewitching collaboration with the Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor. Passport, the group's almost

contemporaneous second disc, is just as itinerant and equally seductive. It makes a fairly random assortment of cultural

stops, from Yerevan to Mexico City to Forest Hills, Queens, all linked by a distinctive Brooklyn swing. The album

opens with a suite of Armenian folk songs transcribed for string quartet by the priestly ethnomusicologist Komitas

Vardapet and performed with muscular conviction and fragile wistfulness. It feels like a small hop to "La Muerte

Chiquita," a ballad by the Mexican pop band Café Tacuba, which the composer Osvaldo Golijov has transformed

through the application of perfumed lyricism and whispering harmonics. The players of Brooklyn Rider are also

members of an elastic society of New York-based musicians who treat the world's musical traditions as if they were

separated by little more than a couple of subway stops. Another fellow traveler is Ljova, a violist and composer who

specializes in what might be termed Eastern-European avant-folk and who wrote "Crosstown," a lovely nocturne with a

plaintive sax-like solo above a bluesy plucked bass. But the disc's keystone work is the 14-minute "Brooklesca" by the

group's violinist Colin Jacobsen. It has the feeling of a shape-shifting, key-switching, rhythm-bending jam session, shot

through with Persian motifs and Gypsy bravura. The beat is rock & roll-solid, the improvisational style elastic and

relaxed, and the inventiveness assured. Jacobsen and his quartet mates play it as if the music were in their blood stream,

or at least in the atmosphere of their heterogeneous borough.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

The L.A. Times Music Blog April 5, 2009

Live review: Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider at UCLA’s Royce

Hall

BY JOHN PAYNE

Laying bare the links and contrasts between the traditional music of Persia and the modernist leanings of the Euro-

American chamber ensemble, the Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) master Kayhan Kalhor was joined Saturday night

at UCLA’s Royce Hall by contemporary classical string quartet Brooklyn Rider.

Along with his border-crossing collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, Kalhor, of Kurdish descent, has earned acclaim

for his alliances with Persian and Indian musicians in the Ghazal ensemble. He met the members of Brooklyn Rider

when both became involved in Yo-Yo Ma’s collaborative and charitable Silk Road Project in 2000. The partnership

between Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider resulted in “Silent City,” a 2008 album released on Harmonia Mundi’s World

Village label, and one that illustrated their mutual affinity for a gently experimental blending of seemingly disparate

musical traditions.

The UCLA performance opened with a Persian traditional song called “Ascending Bird,” arranged by Brooklyn Rider’s

Colin Jacobsen with noted santur musician Siamak Aghaei. Its complex layers of overlapping strings and coiling,

vocal-like kamancheh -- with a distant pitter-patter of hand percussion -- conjured a vivid flight out of, perhaps,

nocturnal quietude toward a shimmering, golden sun. Kalhor’s “Parvaz” offered super-refined flickering tones

enmeshed with the string ensemble’s sinuous yet more strident strokes, producing a thrillingly opaque field of string

sound.

Brooklyn Rider’s core quartet presented a lusciously harmonized set of Armenian folk songs by Vartabed Komitas,

performing several short, sweet works ranging in mood from the plaintive and coy to the mystical. The fruity, almost

opulent sound of these songs felt simultaneously antiquated and modern, and suggested melodic and harmonic links

between the regional traditions of Armenia, Iran and Turkey, along with the graceful impressionism of Western

European composers such as Ravel and Debussy.

Kayhan and the ensemble also performed Jacobsen’s “Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged” and “Brooklesca,” the

former based on Fuzuli’s 16th-century Turkic poem about ill-fated lovers and containing melodic references to the

songs of 14th-century Italian troubadours. These were serviceable but rather repetitive and comparatively lightweight

pieces. Nevertheless, they were further enlightened by fusions of far-flung traditions.

Commemorating Halabja, a Kurdish village in Iraq destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war by Iraqi forces, the evening’s

centerpiece was Kalhor’s “Silent City,” a mysterious, slowly evolving piece shrouded in stillness and cleverly colored

by Kalhor and the string players’ technique of simulating echo/reverb effects. A protracted, semi-improvised opening

lament created a hovering, ruminatory air that gained not only a tension, but also a growing anticipation, eventually

breaking out in a jubilant twine of tones exploding in all directions. It suggested the dawn of a new, better life.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

Mercury News March 27, 2009

Persian-violin master Kayhan Kalhor performs with string quartet

at SFJazz BY ANDREW GILBERT

Kayhan Kalhor has spent much of his adult life introducing Western audiences to the seductive subtleties of Iranian

music.

An unsurpassed master of the kamancheh, the ancient four-string Persian spiked violin, Kalhor is a founding member

of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and the driving force behind the esteemed groups Dastan, Ghazal and Masters of

Persian Music.

After more than two decades of living in Europe and the United States, Kalhor moved back to Iran several years ago.

As a player and composer he is still devoted to his work as a musical ambassador, a role he's taken to new heights with

his latest project, "Silent City," an extraordinary collaboration with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider released last

September on World Village. He performs the Bay Area premiere of the "Silent City" project with Brooklyn Rider at

the Palace of the Fine Arts Theatre on April 5 as part of the SFJazz spring season.

"I've been around really first-rate musicians, Yo-Yo Ma, other classical musicians who made me aware of things I

might have just disregarded," says Kalhor, 46, speaking by phone from a motel in upstate New York. "Living abroad

for almost a quarter century, I always wanted to learn about other cultures. We live in a world where we can't just be

one-dimensional in anything we do."

Born into a Kurdish family in Tehran, Kalhor was still a child when he started attracting attention with his preternatural

talent on the kamancheh. He spent his teenage years as a featured soloist with the National Orchestra of Radio and

Television of Iran. While immersing himself in the Persian classical repertoire, a body of music stretching back

thousands of years and known as the radif, he also studied Kurdish folkloric music, which became a launching pad for

his cross-cultural collaborations with musicians from India, Turkey and beyond.

"I believe the radif is the bricks to build the building, not the building itself," Kalhor says. "I think the radif is a pure

form to learn music, a musical alphabet. When you learn that, you're just in the beginning of the journey."

"Silent City" is his most powerful album yet. The title track is a nearly half-hour piece he created in response to

Saddam Hussein's destruction of the Kurdish Iraqi city of Halabja at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Starting with a

devastated hush, it slowly builds to an incantatory lament on the kamancheh based on a traditional Turkish melody.

"There are very few pieces in life that affect you like this when you first hear them, maybe Mahler or Miles Davis or

'Rite of Spring' — it's that kind of revelation," says composer Osvaldo Golijov, who first got to know Kalhor in 2000

when they both contributed to Kronos Quartet's Nonesuch album "Caravan."

Golijov has looked for opportunities to work with Kalhor ever since, and the composer featured Kalhor's haunting

kamancheh on his score for Francis Ford Coppola's 2007 film "Youth Without Youth." When Golijov first tried to

describe Kalhor's sound to the director, Coppola was unimpressed.

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

Mercury News March 27, 2009

page 2 of 2

"But when he heard it he wanted to use it all over the place," Golijov says. "It has a tenderness that's not personal; it's

anthropological. Kayhan is the master of that instrument. He's taken the kamancheh to places it has never traveled

before, musically, emotionally and culturally. The civilization that he represents is very powerful, and he's at the top."

Since moving back to Iran in 2003, Kalhor has been seeking to stitch together generational relationships severed by the

1979 revolution that transformed Iran into an Islamic republic that greatly restricted musical performances.

"There's a young generation of musicians who grew up after the revolution, and the relationship between them and the

previous generation hasn't been great," Kalhor says. "All of the old masters left Iran around the revolution in search of

better situations and more concerts. I'm very fortunate to be in between that old generation and the new one."

Kayhan Kalhor with Brooklyn Rider

When: 7 p.m. April 5

Where: Palace of the Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon St., San Francisco

Tickets: $20-$55; (866) 920-5299,

www.sfjazz.org

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

Pitchfork Media January 23, 2009

Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider: Silent City BY JOE TANGARI

Kayhan Kalhor is a Kurdish Iranian master of Persian music and one of the greatest living players of the kamancheh, a

four-stringed, upright Persian fiddle that's tuned like a violin but has a darker tone; Brooklyn Rider is a young

American string quartet in the tradition of the Kronos and Balanescu Quartets. Together, their repertoire is a mixture of

classic string pieces, modern compositions, and originals composed by one of the group's violinists, Colin Jacobsen,

and fleshed out by a talented bunch, equally comfortable improvising and playing complex arrangements as they are

performing in concert halls and small rock clubs.

Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider met as members of Yo-Yo Ma's ambitious Silk Road Ensemble, a project seeking to unite

the vast range of musical traditions along the historic trade route in a way that preserves each one but casts it in the

context of something broad and modern. They continue in that spirit on Silent City, finding common ground between

Persian folk and modern minimalism. The album's two short pieces, "Ascending Bird" and "Parvaz", bridge those

genres directly, the former by adapting a piece of folk music, and the latter by retelling the same legend with a new

composition by Kalhor. "Ascending Bird" balances slow and deliberate phrases from the quartet, with Kalhor's warm,

searching kamancheh and frenzied santur (Persian hammer dulcimer) from guest Siamak Aghaei. Percussionist Mark

Suter and double bassist Jeff Beecher are also on hand to widen the aural palette.

Colin Jacobsen's "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged" fuses a passage inspired by the Central-Asian Romeo &

Juliet story Layla & Majnun with a 14th-century Italian song, beginning with a long, solemn meditation on the latter

before swelling and finally bursting into its rhythmic second half. Engineer Jody Elff has brilliantly captured the detail

and dynamic depth of the group, and this is most apparent on the half-hour centerpiece, Kalhor's magnificent

composition "Silent City". It begins nearly inaudible, with a slow improvisation that gradually grows to a heaving, jaw-

dropping climax around the 17-minute mark, only to break back down to an aching, kamancheh-led passage. Where the

first climax comes with a sudden shift from dissonance to gorgeous consonance, the second is a cathartic, celebratory

dance movement, with Suter returning to percussion.

Silent City has something for nearly everyone-- classical music fans will appreciate the fine quality of the playing,

world music aficionados will enjoy the cross-cultural currents, and it's very easy to see kids reared on post-rock and

miminalist electronic music feeling at home here (if you've ever liked anything released on Kranky, you're almost

certain to enjoy this). Experimentalism is always more rewarding when it leads to resounding emotional depth, and this

is as good an example as you'll find of a group of musicians achieving that ideal balance.