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Jazz Mirrors Iran, Part IV: An American in Tehran

Lloyd Miller is no typical fan boy. If there’s one thing to know about him, it’s that he doesn’t like mainstream music, likely most of the stuff on your iPod. Groupie he is not, calling most of today’s new hits “jumpy ugly obnoxious rock junk that has permeated the whole world like leprosy destroying everyone’s musical tastes and minds.” You could write him off as an aging music snob, but then you’d be missing out on one of the edgiest pioneers in building the musical bridge between East and West.

It’s a bridge that for centuries silenced African-American artists and communities, who developed jazz as the art form to revise the human condition and to remove the barriers between “us” and “them” in a democratic language that knew no boundaries. Jazz, as the art that fights against various types of segregation, could be a myth itself. But the myth of jazz as something for all human beings, regardless of race, nationality, gender and age is so strong that it can still feed our desire to explore and to change.

Monday Mixtape: Choreographer Parijat Desai

Music hardly exists in a vacuum. Like an interconnected web, each tune, each track released to the world both came from somewhere and leads to something else. At Aslan Media, we recognize that very few albums come to us without influence, and it’s those artists that it’s those artists that walked the road before who helped shape the styles and expressions of the music artists we profile in this website today.

To show that music, in its purest form, is an expression that knows no physical, cultural, societal or economic boundaries, Aslan Media’s new monthly series called Monday Mixtape, profiles the tunes enjoyed by artists featured on this site. They share with us the tracks that inspire and influence who and where they are as music artists. The genres covered by these playlists are limitless, as are the artists they include, which can include those from countries outside the Middle East that carry universal messages found in every region of the world.

New York-based contemporary dance choreographer Parijat Desai (previously profiled by Aslan Media) is no stranger to music’s ability to move, both physically and melodically. “I feel like I’m working on three levels,” she says, “the music, the movement and dramatically. It kind of happens all at once.” Each of her dances comes out of a “two-prong conception,” she explains. “One is that I have really been motivated by music and love of a certain kind of music, then along with that, I develop a theme, or a theme comes to mind in relationship with that music… all of that leads to, how can I use the contemporary framework and the vocabularies at my disposal to respond to or evoke any aspects of these music?” From there she creates dances that her company mostly performs to live music, sometimes improvisational. “Once we set the structure [with the musicians],” she explains, “they’re the ones who are essentially composing live.”

Jazz Mirrors Iran, Part III: Isn’t It Iranic?

From the Shahs of Sunset to the Mullahs of Qom, Iran stands a Catch-22 waddling to find its way between Bravo and Basij, Marxist and Muslim, youth and establishment, sincerity and tar’ruf. Sound confusing? Welcome to Irani irony, a culture where expectations are implied but never stated, perhaps the only one where you’ll find yourself politely chastised. To navigate in it is an improvisational act of its own, an interplay where actions depend on relational anticipation. This is the game of Persian life.

An example: Punctuality is a rare practice in Iran, but a common expectation. Time there is an elastic notion, yet tardiness is seen as a sign of disrespect. Perhaps it’s best to say that many Iranians run on implied time, a concept about as ironic as implied rhythm in jazz. Like Iran, jazz is loaded with ironies, the most obvious being its elevation as “America’s art form,” enjoying more rights than the musicians who created it.

Jazz Mirrors Iran, Part Two: A Persian Rug, Woven Three Ways

Imagine a space where company mingles without shoes, where opulence finds itself at the heels of its guests traveling across tapestries as if barefoot in a park. Welcome to an Iranian party.

Persia as a country has long been a contested commodity in the modern era, its politics so pervasive, hardly a piece of artwork makes it abroad without some sort of oppositional branding -- the mere fact that it comes from Iran automatically makes it a piece of creative dissidence. The one medium that manages to evade any type of political baggage is not the artwork we hang on our walls, but the adorned canvas we lay out on our floors --Persia’s rugs. Like Iran’s version of Wall Street, these carpets, often called an Iranian’s stock or share, are more than a hypnosis of vivid colors and mesmerizing patterns: they’re a woven record of a country and civilization dating back over 2,500 years, and for most Iranians, a first encounter with the visual blueprints that we come to associate as art.

It’s these associations that brought the so-called Oriental tapestries of Iran from the comfort of living rooms to the imaginations of literature and cinema, and as an exotic symbol of a life of luxury in other art forms, even jazz. But like every luxury in the lap of cultural indulgence, it’s not always a magic carpet ride. The great irony of a Persian rug is also its greatest strength: its ability to disassociate from its turbulent heritage, even by name, while keeping the name Persia after the country became known as it is today -- Iran. It’s through this schism that Persia as a carpet continues to proper while Persia as a country still finds itself victim to misrepresentation and lazy awareness.

Peace, Unity and Hope: A Rockstar’s Dream

How can a man with a guitar and a great hope for Pakistan unite Pakistanis all over the world? Salman Ahmad, founder of the famous Pakistani sufi rock band Junoon, is on the course to do just that. Ahmad has joined forces with his longtime friend, former cricketer and politician Imran Khan, whom he fondly refers to as the “Tsunami of Unity,” to bring a positive change to a “rock-bottom” Pakistan.

He does not support any political party or a particular political agenda. His intentions are clear: bringing the right leadership to Pakistan by spreading social awareness through the vehicle of music.

On December 25th 2011, Ahmad travelled back to Karachi from his native New York to perform at Khan’s historical peace rally. He has also been touring different cities in the U.S. to perform at fundraisers and rallies hosted by various chapter’s of Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice). On March 4, Ahmad performed at a sold-out PTI rally in Los Angeles. “The artist is a party of one,” he told the audience. Although he is not a politician, he considers his role is to uplift people with his music.

Ahmad spoke exclusively to Aslan Media and explained why he thinks Khan is the tsunami of change that Pakistan needs at this very moment.

Aslan Media: Much of your work has a strong political message. What sort of political message do you try to establish with your work?

Salman Ahmad: Right from the beginning, when I left medicine to take up music (I decided that) social service and social activism were always going to be a part of my life. And I believe that to change society, you change politics. The role of an artist, my role, is to raise awareness.

Jazz Mirrors Iran, Part One: Friedrich Gulda’s “Teheran”

Imagine this: A tenor saxophone and bass mimic in sound the pace of rush hour walkers. A trumpet, sounding like a car horn, pops in and out, pulsating along with the beat of the drummer, whose brushes on the snare create an interplay that brings to life the image of a bustling urban city.

No cobblestone streets or the smell of Parisian bread; no green leaves overhanging narrow passageways or the sound of French in the background. This is not Europe. It’s Iran that is being depicted in cool jazz tones.

Of course, the recent (and usual) media heyday over nuclear developments, economic sanctions, and other such political riff-raff distorts these images. Iran remains a country held victim to misrepresentation and lazy awareness.