Festival 47 Wrap Up
LATEST RELEASE
Gord Grdina with Fathieh Honari
CONTENTS
- PLAYLISTS on Spotify and YouTube
- INTERVIEW on YouTube with Gord Grdina (1.23 mins)
- AT THE FESTIVAL a 45 second clip of Grdina at a workshop stage
Festival 47 Wrapped
The Vancouver Folk Music Festival 47 is in the books and was one of the best in recent memory.
This is the final Kurated post featuring a few of this year’s superb performers. If you’re looking for more information on 2024’s artists check out Kurated posts No. 212 through to No. 222. Or visit the Festival website.
Gordon Grdina’s The Marrow with Fathieh Honari includes, from left, bassist Mark Helias, percussionist Hamin Honari, cellist Hank Roberts, guitar and oud player Grdina, and vocalist Fathieh Honari. (Genevieve Monro photo)
GORD GRDINA’S MARROW
Blending Rumi with a bit of jazz, classical Persian sounds and Iranian hits from the 1960s and ’70s
Vancouver’s Gordon Grdina is a shapeshifting musical polyglot who traverses broad sonic terrain. His journey takes in avant-garde jazz, free form improvisation, contemporary indie rock and classical Persian and Arabic sounds.
At July’s Vancouver Folk Music Festival he presented his latest ensemble – Gordon Grdina’s The Marrow with Fathieh Honari– showcasing their self-titled second album. The band’s set featured Grdina on oud (which dates back to 3000 BC) and the yearning vocals of Honari, one of the foremost singers of Persian music in Canada and perhaps North America. The album – released in February – blends traditional Persian and Arabic music with jazz overtones expertly played by esteemed musicians Mark Helias (bass), Hamin Honari (percussion), and Hank Roberts (cello).
In addition to the group’s 50-minute Festival set they also participated in a workshop jam with an array of performers. Look here for a 45-second clip of Grdina rockin’ out.
Haunting and mournful melodies
Our Western ears are unaccustomed to the mournful melodies of Persian song and the sometimes haunting sounds of instruments such as oud, lute, cello as well as tombak – the main percussion instrument in the mix. That’s mainly due to a modal scale which uses different intervals than the heptatonic scale we’re used to. The Persian intervals are based on microtones – notes that fall between the Western scale’s half-step intervals. It’s the microtones that help give the music its distinctive sound.
There’s also a spiritual and mystical quality to Persian songs thanks to the lyrics. “In Persian music, they say that it’s not really music unless there’s poetry,” Grdina writes in his album press package. “So, adding vocals pushes the album more towards a Persian aesthetic. I miss some elements of that because I don’t speak Farsi, though I connect with Fathieh’s beautiful vocals as a sensory feeling and an emotional expression.”
Calling on the mystic and poet Rumi
Grdina’s original songs on the album include lyrics drawn from poetry by world-renowned Middle Eastern mystic Rumi who died in 1273. The record also includes some Iranian radio hits from the 1960s and ’70s and Baluchi music from the small and persecuted Iranian Baloch region where Fathieh Honari has family roots.
JUNO Award-winning Grdina owes his introduction to the oud and Persian music to the Vancouver-based Iranian-Canadian Honari family when he met fellow music student Hidayat Honari at Capilano College. The album is dedicated to the family’s patriarch, Reza Honari, a multi-instrumentalist, kamancheh player and Fathieh’s husband who died while the album was being recorded.
10 August 2024
PLAYLISTS
On Spotify
On YouTube
https://music.youtube.com/browse/VLPLG-pRIXeCU7eGU0FY6wPBwxjakaML3sMd
