Venue: Drom (NY)
Date: August 2, 2013
Review by Dawoud Kringel
On a beautiful summer night, Drom was packed, mostly with Iranians, who were there to hear their man: Mohsen Namjoo. After a brief announcement, Namjoo came to the stage, accompanied by Yahya Alkhansa (member of 127) on percussion. At this point, I must admit I’d never heard Namjoo before this night. Nothing could have prepared me for the performance I was to hear.
A purposefully struck chord cut through the air like the azan or adhan (Islamic call to prayer). A mournful rhythm with two chords was joined by the percussion. Suddenly, a frightening voice broke through. Like Tom Waits crawling through a desert, emerging from a torturous meditation, hallucinating djinns masquerading as Screaming Jay Hawkins reincarnated as a mad Sufi. Weird falsettos and rumbling basso popping out and ambushing the ears. All thus manifesting within a sparse rhythm in an improbable Persian time signature.
When the guitar was allowed to rest, the tar took up the mantle. This effectively channeled the soul if Persia; and painted a picture of an age long gone; and promising it would return in a new form. The vocals seemed to be creating a one man opera; characters changing back and forth. The quarter-tones of Persian radif (a collection of many old melodic figures preserved through many generations by oral tradition) evident even to the untrained western ear.
His tar playing, like his guitar playing, while not spectacular, was good, and appropriately evocative if the vibe he was creating. His strength was in his vocals. He navigated complex melodies, those strange waverings that the western ear interprets as vibrato, maqam tonality, and his other acrobatics with astonishing ease. The emotional content of his singing is almost frightening, or at least startling. One does not need to understand the language to know that this us coming from a deep place.
At one point he did the most improbable version of the Doors “Hello I Love You” imaginable. He altered between craggy, scratchy English and his reckless Farsi, while playing a dervish blues on his tar.
And his love of American blues is evident. Blues is clearly part of his musical foundation. He knew American music. But what he did was the lovechild from the tryst between musical forms Persian and American. In his mind, I imagine, they are two halves of the same whole.
Some of his songs were familiar to the audience. At the beginning of one piece, the audience cheered. A man who sat next to me remarked to me that “this is one of my favorite songs.”
Which brings me to the root of Namjoo’s music. This is a music that belongs to a specific people. That is not to say that visitors are not welcome; hospitality is important to this culture, and everyone is welcome. But westerners are guests in Namjoo’s world. What’s truly evident even to those like me who don’t understand the lyrics (and google translate wasn’t very helpful in this), is that Namjoo’s perspective is that of post-Revolutionary Iran. This is the heart and soul of post-revolutionary Iran, which is trying to hold its Persian roots while at the same time surviving in a country not their own.
