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TIGRAN HAMASYAN, THE PIANIST GIVING JAZZ AN ARMENIAN TWIST
He's the hottest pianist in jazz and he likes to mix things up,
whether it's bebop, thrash metal or dubstep. But his heart is in the
folk music of his native land
John Lewis The Guardian, Thursday 24 October 2013 15.59 BST Jump to
comments (0)
Tigran Hamasyan: 'I get into different types of music and really
immerse myself in each one.'
Somewhere, there's home-movie footage of a three-year-old Tigran
Hamasyan at his childhood home in rural Armenia. He is listening to
Black Sabbath's Paranoid and freaking out on a toy guitar. "That was my
childhood ambition," he laughs. "Still, to this day, if I could become
a killer guitar player in a couple of years, I'd quit playing the
piano and start learning now. I'd love to front a thrash metal band!"
Thankfully, thrash metal's loss has been jazz's gain. At the age of 26,
this tiny, impish Armenian-American is the hottest pianist in jazz,
selling out arenas and earning fervent praise from the likes of Chick
Corea, Brad Mehldau and Herbie Hancock (the latter declared: "Tigran,
you are my teacher now!"). But Hamasyan isn't even sure if he makes
jazz music. "I suppose it's jazz in the sense that I'm improvising,"
he says. "But the language I try to use when I'm improvising is not
bebop but Armenian folk music."
Hamasyan has an omnivorous musical diet. He devours traditional songs
from Armenia, Scandinavia and India, and has studied classical music
to a high level (he has suggested a budding jazz pianist would be
better off playing Bach or Chopin than studying bebop), while his
iPod playlist is that of the twentysomething hipster - J Dilla, Flying
Lotus, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Skrillex and a heavy dose of thrash metal.
But the music he makes doesn't really sound like any of the above. We
meet after he's played to a sold-out 2,000-seat theatre in Toulouse,
where his 90-minute set lurches from delicate, impressionistic
versions of eastern orthodox hymns to bursts of electronica; from
Keith Jarrett-like meditations to full-on jazz-rock.
"I get into different types of music and really immerse myself in each
one and then move on," he says. "But I try to retain that intensity
whenever I revisit any particular music." In the past 18 months
alone he has collaborated with Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu,
Tunisian oud playerDhafer Youssef, dubstep collective LV, oddball
hip-hop producer Prefuse 73, along with fellow Armenian-American Serj
Tankian from prog-metal outfit System of a Down.
Hamasyan was born in Gyumri, near Armenia's border with Turkey.
Neither of his parents were musicians (his father was a jeweller, his
mother a clothes designer), and he grew up listening to his father's
heavy rock collection - Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and
Queen. By three, he was picking out pop melodies on the family piano;
from six he attended a specialist music school. "We can be grateful
to the old Soviet Union that we had classical education systems
in place," he says. "Everybody had a piano in their house, whether
they were musicians or not." By the age of nine he began to immerse
himself in jazz, and even guested as a singer with a local big band
("I was this weird, talented kid who sang a couple of standards and
a Beatles song, Oh Darling").
As a young teenager, he moved on from bebop to experiment with Armenian
folk music. "My idea was to try to weave these folk melodies into
jazz improvisations," he says. "My first attempts were terrible!
The challenge is that folk music is modal, with no chord changes. So
you are trying to find harmonies for a music that's not supposed
to have harmonies. That's tough." Few Armenian jazz musicians had
tried this; instead Tigran was inspired by classical composers Avet
Terterian andArno Babajanian, who "took Armenian folk music into
insane territory".
At 16, he left to study in California ("there are probably more
Armenians there than in Armenia," he jokes), where he has lived ever
since. He quickly made connections on the LA jazz scene, recording his
first album when he was only 18. His fifth and latest, Shadow Theatre,
features a varied lineup, mixing Hamasyan's piano and wordless vocals
with touches of baroque, jazz-rock and electronica. One Armenian folk
song (Drip) is transformed into juddering dubstep, another (Pagan
Lullaby) resembles Sigur Ros. But, if the settings are expansive,
the melodies are simple and direct.
"I've been stripping away layers of complexity with each album,"
he says. "You can play a bunch of fast stuff or write a complicated
melody, but the musical part of that is to make it flow naturally." He
will often do that by singing along with himself as he solos, in the
style of Keith Jarrett or Glenn Gould. "Singing along can help to make
your improvisation sound natural," he says. Sometimes you can hear him
beatboxing while he plays, or singing rhythmic patterns in the style
of an Indian tabla player. He will often deliberately restrict himself
to a small range, soloing within the space of a single octave. "When
I solo I tend not to think of myself as a pianist. In my head, I'm
playing a violin or a guitar, say. Often it's all about just finding
a sound and sticking in that register."
Hamasyan has spent much of the past year back in Armenia, which has
made him all the more fascinated by its traditional music. "Folk is
like the first form of expression. Nowadays, if you're a musician,
you're supposed to be cool or special or something," he says. "But,
back in the day, everybody was a musician. Every action, every
ceremony, was accompanied by music. You watch women churning butter
and there's a folk song that accompanies each movement in that
process. You go to parts of rural Armenia and you see people singing
and harmonising, spontaneously. It's amazing, like watching the birth
of music itself."
Shadow Theatre is released on 4 November on Verve. Hamasyan plays
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 19 November as part of the London
jazz festival.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/24/tigran-hamasyan-pianist-jazz-armenian
He's the hottest pianist in jazz and he likes to mix things up,
whether it's bebop, thrash metal or dubstep. But his heart is in the
folk music of his native land
John Lewis The Guardian, Thursday 24 October 2013 15.59 BST Jump to
comments (0)
Tigran Hamasyan: 'I get into different types of music and really
immerse myself in each one.'
Somewhere, there's home-movie footage of a three-year-old Tigran
Hamasyan at his childhood home in rural Armenia. He is listening to
Black Sabbath's Paranoid and freaking out on a toy guitar. "That was my
childhood ambition," he laughs. "Still, to this day, if I could become
a killer guitar player in a couple of years, I'd quit playing the
piano and start learning now. I'd love to front a thrash metal band!"
Thankfully, thrash metal's loss has been jazz's gain. At the age of 26,
this tiny, impish Armenian-American is the hottest pianist in jazz,
selling out arenas and earning fervent praise from the likes of Chick
Corea, Brad Mehldau and Herbie Hancock (the latter declared: "Tigran,
you are my teacher now!"). But Hamasyan isn't even sure if he makes
jazz music. "I suppose it's jazz in the sense that I'm improvising,"
he says. "But the language I try to use when I'm improvising is not
bebop but Armenian folk music."
Hamasyan has an omnivorous musical diet. He devours traditional songs
from Armenia, Scandinavia and India, and has studied classical music
to a high level (he has suggested a budding jazz pianist would be
better off playing Bach or Chopin than studying bebop), while his
iPod playlist is that of the twentysomething hipster - J Dilla, Flying
Lotus, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Skrillex and a heavy dose of thrash metal.
But the music he makes doesn't really sound like any of the above. We
meet after he's played to a sold-out 2,000-seat theatre in Toulouse,
where his 90-minute set lurches from delicate, impressionistic
versions of eastern orthodox hymns to bursts of electronica; from
Keith Jarrett-like meditations to full-on jazz-rock.
"I get into different types of music and really immerse myself in each
one and then move on," he says. "But I try to retain that intensity
whenever I revisit any particular music." In the past 18 months
alone he has collaborated with Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu,
Tunisian oud playerDhafer Youssef, dubstep collective LV, oddball
hip-hop producer Prefuse 73, along with fellow Armenian-American Serj
Tankian from prog-metal outfit System of a Down.
Hamasyan was born in Gyumri, near Armenia's border with Turkey.
Neither of his parents were musicians (his father was a jeweller, his
mother a clothes designer), and he grew up listening to his father's
heavy rock collection - Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and
Queen. By three, he was picking out pop melodies on the family piano;
from six he attended a specialist music school. "We can be grateful
to the old Soviet Union that we had classical education systems
in place," he says. "Everybody had a piano in their house, whether
they were musicians or not." By the age of nine he began to immerse
himself in jazz, and even guested as a singer with a local big band
("I was this weird, talented kid who sang a couple of standards and
a Beatles song, Oh Darling").
As a young teenager, he moved on from bebop to experiment with Armenian
folk music. "My idea was to try to weave these folk melodies into
jazz improvisations," he says. "My first attempts were terrible!
The challenge is that folk music is modal, with no chord changes. So
you are trying to find harmonies for a music that's not supposed
to have harmonies. That's tough." Few Armenian jazz musicians had
tried this; instead Tigran was inspired by classical composers Avet
Terterian andArno Babajanian, who "took Armenian folk music into
insane territory".
At 16, he left to study in California ("there are probably more
Armenians there than in Armenia," he jokes), where he has lived ever
since. He quickly made connections on the LA jazz scene, recording his
first album when he was only 18. His fifth and latest, Shadow Theatre,
features a varied lineup, mixing Hamasyan's piano and wordless vocals
with touches of baroque, jazz-rock and electronica. One Armenian folk
song (Drip) is transformed into juddering dubstep, another (Pagan
Lullaby) resembles Sigur Ros. But, if the settings are expansive,
the melodies are simple and direct.
"I've been stripping away layers of complexity with each album,"
he says. "You can play a bunch of fast stuff or write a complicated
melody, but the musical part of that is to make it flow naturally." He
will often do that by singing along with himself as he solos, in the
style of Keith Jarrett or Glenn Gould. "Singing along can help to make
your improvisation sound natural," he says. Sometimes you can hear him
beatboxing while he plays, or singing rhythmic patterns in the style
of an Indian tabla player. He will often deliberately restrict himself
to a small range, soloing within the space of a single octave. "When
I solo I tend not to think of myself as a pianist. In my head, I'm
playing a violin or a guitar, say. Often it's all about just finding
a sound and sticking in that register."
Hamasyan has spent much of the past year back in Armenia, which has
made him all the more fascinated by its traditional music. "Folk is
like the first form of expression. Nowadays, if you're a musician,
you're supposed to be cool or special or something," he says. "But,
back in the day, everybody was a musician. Every action, every
ceremony, was accompanied by music. You watch women churning butter
and there's a folk song that accompanies each movement in that
process. You go to parts of rural Armenia and you see people singing
and harmonising, spontaneously. It's amazing, like watching the birth
of music itself."
Shadow Theatre is released on 4 November on Verve. Hamasyan plays
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 19 November as part of the London
jazz festival.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/24/tigran-hamasyan-pianist-jazz-armenian