Monday 12 September 2016

Mirror and Song - A collection of 28 cassettes of regional and religious music of Iran published in Iran, recorded in 1994 - Cassette 1: Ashiq Music of Eastern Azerbaijan


This is one of several collections of regional music produced in Iran in the last 20 years. Whereas other collections, like Gosan Parsi - Some Examples Of The Melodious Tale In Iran (15 volumes), Bakhtyari Music (15 volumes) and Iran Epic Music (23 volumes) have been republished - or directly published - on CD, this collection exists only on cassette. A couple of years ago the Iranian label Barbad had announced an edition on CD, but it never saw the day. Recently the legendary Iranian label Mahoor started to publish some of these recordings on single CDs in their "Regional Music of Iran" series, but it doesn't seem, that there ever will be the complete series on CD. 
Mirror and Song was produced and edited by Mohammad Reza Darvishi (born 1955). Mohammad Reza Darvishi is an extremely creative and productive composer of film music, music researcher, especially in the domain of regional music of Iran, and book author. He has produced dozens of excellent CDs and cassettes and written over a dozen of books on regional and classical Iranian music. He also organized several festivals of regional music, mostly in Tehran. Most of the collections on cassette or CD are recordings from these festivals. In this way he did an enormous work in making regional musical forms of Iran known to a bigger public and saving the music from extinction.
This collection is especially interesting as it contains a.o. different forms of ritual music like Sufi Dhikrs etc. of which no other recordings exist, as far as I know.
We will, step by step, post this complete collection, hopefully about one cassette per day.

Regarding the names of the musicians, I'm only able to decipher the names of musicians I know: here we have on side A in the first two tracks the wellknown Saz virtuoso Imran Haydari and on side B in the first track a famous Ashiq: Ashiq Rasul Ghorbani. The other names I'm not able to decipher completely.

Azerbaijan refers in this series to the Iranian province Azerbaijan, not the Republic of Azerbaijan.




Here for the first time I'm using Dropbox to share these cassettes. If there occur any problems please let me know. Thanks.

13 comments:

autumnleaf said...

THank you, Tawfiq, for all of your generous postings...I like the use of Dropbox as a means of file sharing and it worked great, I appreciate it.I have made a few comments over the years you have been sharing, and would like to reciprocate with some things you might find of interest; I think Dropbox is a good way to do that, but am unclear as to how to share with it as I have only used it a little and with smaller files with a friend...to begin with, I have some 'filler' albums of the Algerian Andalusian festivals for two of the years....in any case, I look forward to your generous postings.

Gary said...

Worked fine ... thank you so much for this!

roberth said...

thanks for these and the music of Baluchestan as well
dropbox worked fine
robert

Tawfiq said...

Many thanks for the feedback regarding Dropbox. I was not sure.

Tawfiq said...

To autumnleaf: thank you very much. My pleasure. If you have a Dropbox account, even the small free one, you always can upload files, also bigger ones, and then share them and send me the link for the file(s). You can send the link to: info@raga-maqam-dastgah.com
Thank you very much in advance.

MarviniusMartinius said...

thank you for sharing these. You mention other series of Persian music, do you have any of these to share ?

Tawfiq said...

The other series are on CD and can be bought from: info@raga-maqam-dastgah.com

Ambrose Bierce said...

Superb endeavour - thanks a lot as usual, Tawfiq!

AmbroseBierce said...

But dropbox is extremely slow, as compared to adrive, 1fichier and many other file hosters. Downloading one album of 400MB takes about 5 hours for me - adrive was about 5 minutes.

Richard said...

Dropbox has worked great for me.

I have a dropbox account (as well as iCloud and Adrive accounts) and DB is the easiest of the services for me to directly save to my account rather than directly downloading (which takes 10 times longer... and then I have to find a place to put the files where I will remember them).

Ambrose Bierce -- I have trouble believing Dropbox is 60x slower than adrive (5 hours vs 5 minutes) -- it is not that slow for me, but I have been mistaken many times in the past. Maybe because I have a dropbox account, or maybe there is something about how my ISP handles dropbox accounts. It just seems like too big of a difference...

My understanding is the fastest downloads are from Mega, but I am not going to take a chance on a company which has already been shut down once (as megaupload) and which is overly choosy about which browsers works with its service.

This current series of cassette tapes is just amazing. So much fantastic music in the world! I spent 30-35 years exhaustively exploring and analyzing essentially the entire corpus of western popular/jazz/rock music to the point where almost none of the new material is interesting anymore. Since getting progressively interested in asian, central asian, indonesian, persian, and indian music since the late 1980s, I have discovered a world of music which (because of its depth and my limited lifespan) is not going to be exhaustively explored in my lifetime. That is such a great feeling!

I used to think that no blog would ever be able to complete with Holy Warbles or Nations of Luobaniya, but I believe that "Tawfiq" has in fact equalled and now surpassed those venerable (and retired) blogs in terms of amount and range of music available, multiplied by its rarity and quality.

Thanks so much as always.

In the face of your sustained generosity and kindness, words cannot hope to convey my appreciation for your efforts.

Please keep it up, even if it at times can be a lot of work.

Ambrose Bierce said...

As for dropbox, I was quite surprised of the slow speed myself. I have a dropbox account too, and tried transferring the files to my account (which worked well and fast) and then downloading from there - average speed: 20 kbp/s. With 1fichier, mega or adrive I have speeds like 1mb/s or more.

Whatever, the music is worth waiting for sure, but it means I have to keep my computer running over night or all day while I'm at work, just to get one file. Inconvenient, nothing more - and nothing less.

Ambrose Bierce said...

I had almost given up on this series, but today, suddenly, dropbox returned to its old speed. Must have been a problem in my area, whatever, now everything's fine.

Fattoxxon said...

OMG - wow, I've just been (re-)listening to the Fajr music festival tapes again, and now along comes 28 more cassettes of Iranian music! What a generous share, thank you so much Tawfiq!!!