Oriental Traditional Music from LPs & Cassettes: Iran Vol. 2 - Anthologie de la musique traditionnelle - Majid Kiani - Santur

Here the second volume of this marvellous anthology, this time presenting the great Radif master Majid Kiani on Santur. He made a couple of tours to Europe and I was able to attend several times concerts in Holland and in Munich and Cologne, all in the 1990s, if I remember right.

He only released two LPs and one CD in Europe, but in Iran he has quite a number of releases, especially his excellent complete Radif on 4 CDs published in 1992 and a new recording of his Radif on 4 DVDs published in 2006. This LP and the two Radifs I listened to (and watched) many many times over the years. Especially the Radif from 1992, which I was able to obtain at an Iranian Festival in Düsseldorf when it just was published, was a feast for me.

In 2016 we posted a cassette in which he accompanies the great singer Rambod Sodeyf.

On the artist see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majid_Kiani

The sheer beauty of the music of Majid Kiani leads me to another remark about authentic traditional Dastgah music of Iran: this music has a very contemplative nature, as if contemplating the beauties of nature, an amazing landscape for example, or a very refined magnificent architecture, like one of the many beautiful mosques of Persia, or the secrets of creation and its Creator, expressing and explaining secrets which can't be expressed in words. In this the music is completely detached from the human sorrows and lifts one completely out of them. And this is the mark of all real great music of the Orient: it is never sentimental or dramatic and differs in this respect greatly from modern versions of it, which are always either sentimental or dramatic or both. All this is true also of other great traditions of Oriental music as the real great Indian Raga music or the Maqam music of Uzbekistan, for example.