Millennium of Tanbur – Booklet Introduction
I speak of lovers, he of their opponents; / my tanbur and reason will never be in tune.
— Saeb Tabrizi
This work is the result of years of research into the Haqqani (sacred), ancient, figurative and contemporary maqams of the tanbur. The tanbur is an enduring heritage that the Kurdish Yarsan people have guarded for centuries against the onslaught of outsiders.
The alphabet of tanbur music is built on the maqam (the melodic-modal pieces of its repertoire), and playing the instrument is impossible without knowing these maqams. The tanbur is played intensively in four areas – Sahneh, Guran and Delfan* – and more sparsely in the Azeri-speaking regions (including Tabriz, Hamadan and Zanjan). Although the maqams flow along one path, there are small differences in how they are performed, which stem solely from dialect, accent, culture and climate.
* Delfan here means parts of Kuhdasht and Nurabad whose people speak Laki. In fact, the tanbur began to take shape in maqam form in the time of Shah Khoshin of Lorestan (nearly a thousand years ago) and in this very region.
In each of these regions, trusted narrators have handed the maqams down. In tanbur maqam playing and singing, a narrator (ravi) is someone who learned the maqams in the traditional way, by ear and from memory (without notation or recordings), and passed this knowledge on, mouth to mouth, to the next generation. The narrators therefore play the maqams closer to how they were performed centuries ago. (Maqam narrators have usually enjoyed a special social and spiritual standing among the people.)
Among the narrators of the Sahneh area are the late Seyed Faraj-ollah Shahebrahimi, Seyed Lotf-ollah Shahebrahimi, Nemat-ollah Mokri (Jeyhunabadi), Nour Ali Elahi, Seyed Ayaz Ghazvinei, Seyed Hamid Khan Ahmadi, Seyed Amrollah Shahebrahimi, Seyed Agha Aziz Zolnuri, Seyed Ghadamyar Hosseini, Baba Gholam Monfarednia (Hemmatabadi), Hossein Ruhtafi and Darvish Amir Hayati. After them, in recent years, the eminent tanbur master, the late Seyed Khalil Alinejad, carried on the path of his predecessors.
In the Guran area, one can name the late Seyed Shamseddin Heydari, Kadara Manhuei, Seyed Ghasem Afzali, Seyed Mahmoud Alavi, Seyed Vali Hosseini, Lalo Badrkhan and Amirza Seydali Kafashian; among living narrators in Guran are Master Taher Yarveysi and Seyed Teymour Mehrabi. Emamgholi Emami and Najafali Mirzaei are well-known tanbur narrators of the Delfan area. In the Azeri-speaking regions there were no narrators in the sense described above, but a few players and kalam singers worked to spread these songs and melodies.
The present work is a collection of tanbur maqams of the Sahneh region, performed sometimes after the version of a single narrator and sometimes as a blend of the versions of several maqam masters and narrators. Some maqams of other regions (Guran, the Azeri-speaking areas and Delfan) are performed in the Sahneh manner only to make players more familiar with these styles; the collector makes no claim about the maqams of the other areas.
In compiling this collection the emphasis has been on authenticity of performance: all the maqams were played and recorded by ear, without a metronome. In the final production nothing was altered in the pitch of the singer’s voice, and in some pieces clapping and chorus singing have been included to give the listener a sense of being in a local setting (in keeping with its culture and traditions). Some maqams are performed with similar melodies but different words, in order to preserve the different versions of the maqams and to record the maqam playing of contemporaries for future generations.
In this album the tanbur maqams (following the view of the narrators of the Sahneh region) are presented in three parts:
Haqqani: the maqams of the Pardivar period and those from before and after Pardivar, all of them sung with kalam (sacred Yarsan verse). (Pardivar is regarded as a turning point for the maqams and the kalams.)
Ancient and figurative (majlesi, for gatherings): maqams surviving from ancient times that the Yarsan people have preserved by oral tradition.
Contemporary compositions (sardams): pieces that well-known narrators and notable Yarsan figures composed for zekrs (devotional invocations). Some of these pieces are more than a hundred years old.
Finally, a few points must be made. This work is a purely research-oriented collection of tanbur maqam playing. All of it was recorded intermittently over a year, and the length of this process led to differences in the sound of the tanbur and the voice in some pieces. In preparing the work the collector concentrated on technical matters and on comparing the different versions of the maqams; a detailed discussion will soon be published in a book of the same name.
We hope that this album – the fruit of months of day-and-night work by an experienced team devoted to the traditions and the noble culture of the Kurds – will find favour with lovers of the arts.
Collected and performed (tanbur and vocals): Farid Elhami
Recording, mixing and mastering: Vahid Mehri
Chorus: Forud Khamushian, Navid Ghazvinei, Touraj Aliyoun, Ramtin Kakavandi
Translation: Azita Rabbani and Elham Keramati; booklet editor: Elham Keramati
Graphics and photography: Reza Salehi
Funding: Shahpar Ghahari and Goudarz Tatari
Publisher: Parseh Sorush Ferdowsi Institute (ferdowsimusic.com)