8/9/2019 San Jose Mercury News: Masters of Persian Music

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ThekeepersfPersian lassicalnusicByAndrew ilbed

Correspondent

Sometimes t seems hat

classicalPersianculture is

welcome everywhere but athome n lran.

Music in particular hasbeen badly buffeted in theIslamic Republic, whereeven the most venerableart-ists oftenare toleratedmorethan celebrated.While sold-out venuesaround the globegreet the multigenerationalensemble Masters of Per-sian Music, which performsSaturdayat Zellerbach Hall

for Cal- Performances andSunday at Montalvo ArtsCenter's Carriase HouseTheatre, in Iranlhe grouprarely has the opportunity toplay n public.

"One of the first effortsthat the regime made in theearlydayswas o banmusic,"savs Abbas Milani, directorofStanford'sIranian StudiesProgram: 'Initially, the onlything they would allow onTV and radio were Islamic

passion plays and Koranicrecitals. Vocalists, particu-Iarly women vocalists, werebanned."

Iran loosenedstricturesagainstconcertsn the 1990s,but the country/s musicianshave found themselves inan incrgasingly tenuous po-sition since the contestedelections in June and therise of a broad-based rotest

movement.For Kayhan Kal-hor, who foundedMasters of

Persian Music with HosseinAlizadeh in 1992, he grouphas provided a welcome n-ternational outlet at a timewhen many doors at homehaveclosed.

"The situation is too socialand oopolitical,"saysKalhor,47, speaking from his homein Tehran. "There are hu-monsous imitations on whatpeoplecan do. We don't have

o Wany concertsscheduled ere2

W"oythough"llg,!,"!Tc,"

nerform over the surlmer.It's difficult to overstate

the reverencewith which theensemble'seadersare held.

A visionary composerhailed as his generation"smost vivid and eloquent in-strumentalist, Alizadeh, 58,is a virtuoso on the Persianplucked lute, or far. Steepedin the vast body of traditionalmelodiesknown as he Radif,

tertwined with rhythms of

classicalPersian poetry, heis also a noted avant-gardecomposer.

"Classicalmusicians areranked in a well-respectedhierarchybasedon whetherthev have studied with a cer-tairi number of masters andlearned the goushehsof thedastgahi' Milani says,refer-ring to the modes and melo-diesthat make up the Radif. _

"There'sa consensrshatAlizadeh is someone who

has delved deeply but alsoinnovatively, particularly bybringing elements of folk-Ioric music nto the classicalstructures.His most famoussongsuse all the ornamenta-tion and all the structures ofclassicalmusic,but infuse twith vivacity and energy offolkloricand ethnicmusic."

Kalhor is better known inthe West than his older col-league, having lived in Eu-rope and the United States

foi much of his adult life(although he moved back toIran in 2003). The world'sforemost master of the Per-sian spike-fiddle, or leaman-cheh,hewasbornnto an ra-nian Kurdish family, and likeAlizadeh has expanded theclassical repertoire by tap-ping into folkloric music. He'sperformedwidely as a found-ing member of Yo-Yo Ma'sSilk Road Ensemble,and Iast

Mastersof PersianMusic

When:8 .m.SundayWhere:Montalvo rtsCenter,i5400 Montalvo oad; ara-toga

Tickets:$35-$45, 08-961-5858,www.montalvoarts.org

Also:8p.m.Saturday,eller-bachHall,Berkeley.25-$60,510-642-9988

performed in the Bay Areawith the innovative stringquartet Brooklyn Rider.

One of the main reasonsthat he and Alizadeh foundedMasters of Persian Musicwas to bridge a generationalchasm exacerbatedby therevolution, which sundereda. musical tradition datingback some1,500 ears.Manyof the country's mid-Z0thcentury masters eft, ran inthe 1980s.Their departureIeft the post-revolutionarygeneration, which makesup nearly 70 percent of the

population,without teachersandguides o passon he an-cient oral tradition.

"We've been trying tokeep the relationshipgoing,and do what's necessary ortoday'sPersianmusic,"Kal-hor says. "'We're workingwith younger rnusicians todiscover what they have tooffer."

The atest versionof Mas-ters of Persian Music show-

casessomeof the tradition's

most celebrated youngerplayers, most notably vocal-ist Hamid RezaNourbakhsh,a discipleofthe vocal egendMohammad Reza Shajarian,who is making his Bay Areadebut. The group also fea-tures Alizadeh's son, NimaAlizadeh on robab (htte),Rouzbeh Rahimi on santur(hammered dulcimer), Ali-reza Hosseini on tombah(drum) and Siamak Jahan-gl y on zey(reed lute).

Rather than only settingbelovedmedievalPersianpo-ets such asHafez,Ferdowsi,Sadi andRumi to music, hegroup also interprets con-temporarypoetry.

While building bridgesamong ranians, Kalhor'andAlizadeh are equally com-mitted to presentinganotherfaceof Iran, where he politi-cal situation oft,enovershad-ows an ancient and sophisti-catedcivilization.

"We come from a veryold and valuableculture thathas contributed a lot to theworld," Kalhor says. We'realways trying to representthe modern culture of lran.We're not pure.traditional-ists,but we're very rooted.

"The linkwith the old cul-ture is there, but we try tobuild on that with modernartists living in today's worldaswell."

Kayhan alhor,eft, ndHossein lizadeh,f hegroupMasters .fPersian usic"Wb're lwaysrying o representhemodern ulture f ranJ' alhor ays.

1O a vocabulary ntimately in-