David Dalle
Thursday May 17th, 2018 with David Dalle
Kayhan Kalhor I: one of the greatest Persian musicians of his generation and a Carleton alumni. Part I, his collaboration with Erdal Erzincan.

Kayhan Kalhor, the peerless Kamancheh virtuoso and consummate musician and composer, will be performing in Ottawa on June 10th, this is his first appearance in Ottawa in over 2 decades! He will be performing with his former student Kiya Tabassian in Under the Persian Musical Sky. https://musicandbeyond.ca/event/under-the-persian-musical-sky/ Kayhan Kalhor is a Kurdish-Iranian musician who studied with the great master Mohammad Reza-Lotfi in Tehran. He also studied Western classical music right here at Carleton. He has been an extraordinary and innovative musician in Persian classical music, but he has also spent much of his career exploring Persian music's relationship with other neighbouring traditions, as well as folk traditions within Iran. Two of his most substantial collaborations have been with Hindustani sitar master Shujaat Hussein Khan (heir to the great Imdadkhani gharana) and Turkish classical baglama (or saz) master Erdal Erzincan. We will hear his first recording with the latter today. Both Hindustani and Turkish classical music are musical cousins of Persian music. With Erdal Erzincan, Kayhan Kalhor really wanted to delve into extended improvisation, in Kayhan's own words: "I explained to him (Erdal), ‘I’m looking for something that departs from nothing and then goes into developing material and then goes into something else really improvised. Maybe we’ll go for a climax in terms of melody and energy and keep it there…And I’m looking at this for a form for maybe an hour of music.’ And he said, ‘I haven’t done that before, but I would like to do this.’ " The result is their first album, an hour long improvisation they named "The Wind". Let the staggering beauty and passionate intensity carry you away!