Caravan World Rhythms presents Ghazal: Kayhan Kalhor and Shujaat Khan, Friday, March 13, 7:30 p.m. at Kay Meek Centre, 1700 Mathers Ave., West Vancouver. Tickets: $30-$50, available online at kaymeekcentre.com or by calling 604-981-6335.
He plays on his knees.
His face is a mask of reverence as Kayhan Kalhor draws his bow across the kamancheh.
(There's one phrase.)
Kalhor's head bobs with a quickening rhythm as the bow moves faster across the instrument, its long neck tapering to a gourd-shaped body.
(That phrase again.)
The music speaks Iran's history, telling tales of troubadours who journeyed from the shores of the Caspian Sea, across the plains or down from the Zagros Mountains, to bring their music to the shining cities of Iran.
Speaking to the North Shore News two weeks before his Kay Meek Centre performance alongside Indian sitar player Shujaat Khan and tabla player Sandeep Das, Kalhor recollects the first time he picked up the kamancheh.
Sometimes called a spiked fiddle, Kalhor discovered the traditional instrument as a boy watching Iranian TV. The 1979 revolution was nearly a decade away and by Kalhor's account the society seemed "little interested in its own culture."
"In my city there was no one who played kamancheh," he says.
Seeing the instrument for the first time was almost hypnotic.
"The sound just captured me. . . . I said, 'I have to play this instrument,'" he recalls.
Kalhor grew up in a Kurdish family in Tehran, Iran. His mother played Kurdish music but his family loved Persian music as well, giving Kalhor a different perspective.
"From Day 1 I had this awareness that there is something beside the art music going on in the country."
While sometimes viewed solely as an Iranian instrument, the kamancheh is marbled into the classical music of several Middle East countries. Kalhor started playing at seven and by the time he was a teenager he had a job with the National Orchestra of Radio and Television of Iran. He was honing his craft alongside a host of accomplished musicians but what may have been Kalhor's most formative experience was the trip he took through Iran in his youth.
"That helped a lot with what I do as a traditional musician today," he says. He went to the western region of Kurdistan and the northeast region of Khorasan, reversing the trail taken by troubadours for centuries.
"That's the cradle of the Persian art music," he says. "That's where the art music come from. Musicians come to bigger cities in search of employment, a better life, being hired in courts, and they bring all this beautiful music with them. . . . We owe it to folk music."
Finding pockets of folk musicians who still play the melodies of the centuries helped Kalhor develop his musical accent.
"Which wasn't that fashionable before but now is well established," he says.
That musical accent is constantly shifting as Kalhor plays with musicians like Shujaat Khan, who "awakens something" inside him.
"The combination of the sound of our instruments seemed magical from Day 1," he says. "Here we are 17 years after that."
The sitar and kamancheh are both part of similar musical cultures, according to Kalhor. "He comes from a background in improvisation," Kalhor says. "So do I."
The two need one phrase to return to, just a riff that creates a gulf between their music and "absolute chaos," Kalhor explains. Other than that, their music can be guided by one another, a spiritual story, or the energy of the audience. "They could actually change your direction," Kalhor says of the audience. "They could take your hand and take you further or just leave you where you are. So it is very important who is in the audience and how the audience listens to your music."
