Music Review by Dawoud Kringle
The New York-based Iranian ensemble Koubeh formed in 2019 and consists of three musicians from the Iranian diaspora. They dedicated themselves to celebrating and reimagining Persian music for contemporary audiences.
Text by Dawoud Kringle
Iranian rapper/poet Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death!
Salehi was born in Iran on December 3rd, 1990. He is a laborer in a metalworks factory. He began recording hip-hop as a means of protest against the social injustices of the Iranian regime.
Interview by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi
Since early 2000 a talented diaspora of a number of Iranian-born musicians have been producing sumptuous sound landscapes here in New York that both incorporate tradition and go beyond it incorporating jazz, blues, alternative rock, chanson, flamenco, heavy metal and electronica.
Well known bands, such as HYPERNOVA and KIOSK moved to New York which was the right artistic location and space to make music without the pressure to get a permission from the Department of Culture in Tehran which required pre-approval of all public performances and CD releases.
One of the newer bands coming out in 2019 is Koubeh based in Brooklyn, New York.
Text by Dawoud Kringle
Axiom of Choice, a southern California based group who dares name themselves after a mathematical concept (i.e. an axiom of set theory equivalent to the statement that the Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty) is someone to be reckoned with.
Photo by Walter Wagner
Text by Dawoud Kringle
The approach to improvisation that Ornette Coleman pioneered in the late 1950s and early 1960s rewrote the book on musical improvisation. However, Coleman’s paradigm shift was only the beginning. San Francisco based composer, saxophonist, and musical theorist Hafez Modirzadeh is among the forerunners of a significant transformation in improvised music, picking up where Coleman left off, and taking it into new places.
