Kuşların Çağrısı (Call of the Birds)

Many of Iranian singer Mahsa Vahdat's projects have been reviewed in Songlines. I came across the honeyed melancholy of her voice for the first time in an artist and student café in Tehran where her Scent of Reunion: Love Duets Across Civilization album, with blues singer Mighty Sam McClain, was playing over and over.

The outstanding Secret Ensemble from Istanbul invited Vahdat to participate on this album. Its title refers to Farid ud-Din Attar's classic Sufi epic, The Conference of the Birds. The texts are from Persian and Turkish spiritual poetry by Yunus Emre, Pir Sultan Abdal, Hafez and others, with the spirit of Sufi thinker Rumi hanging over it all. A Turkish professor in the liner notes claims that Rumi (Persian-born but later based in Anatolia) was a Turk; but the musical collaboration defies such simplified notions.

The Secret Ensemble perform on traditional Turkish instruments, but they make a large frame drum sound the way the Persians play the daf, laying the groundwork for Mahsa Vahdat's four tracks. Unexpected tone colours come from a Western cello and double bass, making almost jazz-like punctuations and even some contrasting dissonant chords here and there. Tracks such as the instrumental ‘Kuşların Çağrısı’ and the opening song ‘Arzulanan Yakut’ are a miracle of musical tone colouring. What helps too is the extraordinary sound quality, a hallmark of the Kalan record label and of any Mahsa Vahdat project.