EVERY GENRE PROJECT - March 26 - Bandari
Genre of the Day - Bandari
Album of the Day - Iran: Music From the Persian Gulf by Saeid Shanbehzadeh (2009)
March 26, 2024
Lately, even the most major of hassles and setbacks feel inconsequential. The sun is shining brighter and longer and there’s bees and butterflies flitting about. Springtime is such a liberation to me: I spend even the mildest winters here in Los Angeles (if it can even be termed as winter, although it does get down into the 40s at night!) bundled up and shielding myself from cold gusts. I run cold, like a lizard, so basking in the sunlight and delicious floral scents of spring is indescribably magical to me. Although every culture in essence has a holiday celebrating the spring, perhaps none are as explicit a celebration as Nowruz, or Persian New Year. Each year, it’s marked on the spring equinox. It makes so much more sense to have the new year fall on the renewal of the earth when the blossoms flourish and nature is in full swing, but instead we toil to watch a ball fall down a pole.
Griping aside, it’s a happy coincidence that today we get a Persian genre following Nowruz a few days ago! And it’s not just any Persian genre, it’s music that likely would be played at a Nowruz party. Bandari hails from southern Iran—the name literally means “of the port.” Bandari is fast, rhythmic dance music featuring an iconic instrument we’ve only been exposed to once thus far in this whole column. Exactly two months ago, the genre was pipe band, and I listened to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers take on a whole bunch of really famous songs to varying results as to the extent the bagpipe was positively presented. Today, we enjoy it in a more traditional form. Though iconic in Scotland’s national image, bagpipes are a worldwide phenomenon, despite seeming like an exceedingly difficult instrument for people to have come up with.
The ney-anban is a bagpipe originating from the same area as Bandari. Ethio-jazz is out: next thing you know the most pretentious man you know is going to be raving about Persian bagpipe jazz. Or maybe the call is coming from inside the house. After all, who’s the one with his fingers on the keyboard right now raving about Persian bagpipe music? I digress. These bagpipes are otherworldly looking and gorgeous. Even a cursory look into the creation of the ney-anban makes the whole bagpipe concept make sense. First of all, these bagpipes are made out of sheepskin, and guess who’s playing it to keep themselves some musical company? Shepherds!! Like animals finding their ecological niches, those who need to listen to music to not go insane create instruments with what they have around them. What could be more convenient to this end for a shepard than, well, an instrument made from ingredients right in front of you?
From these pastoral contexts, trust that a virtuosic instrumentalist will take the instrument to new heights. That's reflected in today’s album by Saeid Shanbezdeh, who pairs his unbelievable playing with bandari drum ensembles. Like the gorgeous fabric stretched over the bag in the album cover, this highly danceable, shockingly rapid (even compared to yesterday) music is entrancing. The melodic and note changes in his playing are so kneejerk and rapid that you may think the audio glitching. The self-referential “Bandari” is a particular showcase here. The pace and melodies of the bagpipe are such a roller coaster, tiny riffs and trills spiraling in a sonic flurry. You’ll barely even notice when the drums pop in at about the six minute mark, even though they do add to the song’s festive feel. These bagpipes possess a noticeably different timbre from Scottish highland bagpipes—the sound is lighter and more glassy. It makes the agility in his riffs particularly sharp, and it’s easily one of the most captivating instrumental sounds I’ve come across in this column. Like the flowers in bloom, these melodies blossom with a can't-be-missed color palette: the season’s only so long, so embrace and enjoy while you can.