Persian Jazz
Rich Mix, East London
★★★★

MY ONLY previous connection with jazz and Iran was and is marvelling at Johnny Hodges’s sublime alto saxophone solo on the Ellington Orchestra’s Isfahan, a musical study of Iran’s holy city from the maestro’s felicitous Far East Suite of 1966.

So to hear three bands in two nights of Iran-inspired music so close to London’ss Banglatown was quite a revelation. First was a trio calling themselves Insanity Route, led by the Iranian lute-like shurangiz virtuoso Behdad Babaei, born in Doha, Qatar in 1974, with fellow shurangiz master Vahid Taremi, and hand percussionist Navid Afghah, born in Shiraz, Iran in 1970, playing the tombak drum.

These three troubadours had more than a little jazz in their souls, as they melodised and improvised with powerful flourish and excitation. Both Babaei and Taremi provoked extraordinary passages of free notes with their liberated riffs, followed by Afghah’s empathetic tombak obbligatos. On Babaei’s long solo beginning to the trio’s unnamed third piece, was that a Persian blues I was hearing, with echoes of Big Bill Broonzy’s or Lonnie Johnson’s guitar? What stories of his homeland was he telling at this far London crossroads of Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road, as his mirror-varnished shurangiz reached deep, deep into the tantalising notes of his improvisation? When Afghah answered in the blur of his drumming fingers, could I hear Baby Dodds, Max Roach or Han Bennink? For he sounded like a band of drums drumming, so broad and multisonic were his pummelling fingers.

The next night it was the eclectic guitar fusion of Persian jazz, gypsy swing and Indian Karnatic rhythms of Kourosh Kanani, of Iranian/Irish parentage, playing with the London drummer Matt Davies. Listening close you could hear some of the dense and often ultra-fast patterns of Babaei and Taremi transformed to Kanani’s electric strings, and Davies’s stop-time full drumset echoing Afghah’s single tombak.

This was explicitly secular music. The slow, haunting theme of Kanani’s Dream 28, with its caustic phrases, made you wonder what the other 27 were like, as Davies’s booming bass drum gained speed at a worrisome rate. Then the young woman singer Amena was announced, who sang a beautifully voiced Kurdish lullaby. The final tune was an Armenian folk song about a young woman who throws her hair ribbon into the sea. It was simplicity beautified, with Kanani’s lucid notes as clear as the voice itself, ending a complete set of rampant and tender syncretism.

The final band was a composite of three Iranians and two Spaniards. Led by electric bassist Arin Keshishi of Armenian roots, with drummer Shayan Fathi and vocalist Delaram Kafashzadeh, both from Tehran. With them were alto saxophonist Robert Nieva from Avila and Xavi Torres from Barcelona.

A young band this, their unity of traditions creating a very different timbre to the Babaei trio, much closer to a conventional jazz sound, but none the less arresting. Nieva wasn’t a Hodges, but the lyricism of his saxophone still soared through the Spitalfields night. Delaram’s wordless, rhythmic, floating instrumental singing made you think that if Norma Winstone had been born in Tehran rather than up the road in Bow, this how she might have sounded, and Torres’s Catalan piano choruses made you remember his late, great compatriot, Tete Montoliu.

Three bands with Iranian foundations, yet as with the inevitable jazz infusion, their realities springing everywhere, nourished by the truth of cosmopolitan east London.