Tigran

On February 11, I was lucky enough to be able to sit in on Tigran Hamasyan’s performance at the Music Room. And a thousand apologies that this review took me so long to write.

But it was a toughie. Hamasyan is obviously a technically impressive wunderkind. His mastering of the piano is something that most of us could only dream of. In terms of skill, he was absolutely magnificent. Winner of several international piano competitions, the man is obviously some kind of genius.

And I should have liked the show.

And I wanted to. But I didn’t. I feel like I must have missed something. His fusion of jazz/experimental piano was bizarre and difficult to follow; sometimes the set-up of experimental noises would take five minutes all on its own. These pauses were disruptive and as he barely spoke to, addressed or even acknowledged the audience, it felt awkward. It was like he was ignoring us.

I love the Music Room as a venue, it’s so intimate. But in this case, I felt like I was intruding on a private recording session. In one piece, Hamasyan spent what seemed like forever performing a beat-box freestyle while mashing the same few notes on the piano. It was fun at first, but after what seems like 10 minutes I just couldn’t deal.

When he stuck to traditional, complex jazz piano pieces I really enjoyed it. The notes were haunting, stirring and at times, playful and silly. I wish there had been more emphasis on these pieces, as they were more impressive and in my opinion, showed off Hamasyan’s very complex range and undeniable talent.

But like I said, I honestly blame myself. The rest of the audience was downright fanatic, with people in the row in front of me moved to weeping. (Not an exaggeration. Sounds like it, but I swear.) The woman sitting directly in front of me had travelled all the way from Moncton, rolling deep with like six additional people, just to watch Hamasyan perform. So it has to be my fault. Something in me doesn’t appreciate the eclectic randomness of a looped glockenspiel or random bell sounds or songs in Armenian. I felt like I was left out of something, because the rest of the audience was truly experiencing something special, and I was not.

At the end of the night, the audience sprang to their feet for an emotional standing ovation – cheering, wiping their eyes and chanting for more. And I was left wondering if I could go home now. Sigh.
- halifax magazine

On February 11, I was lucky enough to be able to sit in on Tigran Hamasyan’s performance at the Music Room. And a thousand apologies that this review took me so long to write.

But it was a toughie. Hamasyan is obviously a technically impressive wunderkind. His mastering of the piano is something that most of us could only dream of. In terms of skill, he was absolutely magnificent. Winner of several international piano competitions, the man is obviously some kind of genius.

And I should have liked the show.

And I wanted to. But I didn’t. I feel like I must have missed something. His fusion of jazz/experimental piano was bizarre and difficult to follow; sometimes the set-up of experimental noises would take five minutes all on its own. These pauses were disruptive and as he barely spoke to, addressed or even acknowledged the audience, it felt awkward. It was like he was ignoring us.

I love the Music Room as a venue, it’s so intimate. But in this case, I felt like I was intruding on a private recording session. In one piece, Hamasyan spent what seemed like forever performing a beat-box freestyle while mashing the same few notes on the piano. It was fun at first, but after what seems like 10 minutes I just couldn’t deal.

When he stuck to traditional, complex jazz piano pieces I really enjoyed it. The notes were haunting, stirring and at times, playful and silly. I wish there had been more emphasis on these pieces, as they were more impressive and in my opinion, showed off Hamasyan’s very complex range and undeniable talent.

But like I said, I honestly blame myself. The rest of the audience was downright fanatic, with people in the row in front of me moved to weeping. (Not an exaggeration. Sounds like it, but I swear.) The woman sitting directly in front of me had travelled all the way from Moncton, rolling deep with like six additional people, just to watch Hamasyan perform. So it has to be my fault. Something in me doesn’t appreciate the eclectic randomness of a looped glockenspiel or random bell sounds or songs in Armenian. I felt like I was left out of something, because the rest of the audience was truly experiencing something special, and I was not.

At the end of the night, the audience sprang to their feet for an emotional standing ovation – cheering, wiping their eyes and chanting for more. And I was left wondering if I could go home now. Sigh.

But while I was there I learned about a lot of exciting shows that JazzEast will be putting on in the next year and am pumped to see what else is in store.
- halifax magazine

Being a virtuoso art, jazz produces prodigies just as miraculous as those in classical music. The Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan is one of them. At the age of three he was picking out his father’s favourite rock songs at the piano, and at nine had moved on to his uncle’s passion for Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. By the age of nineteen he’d moved with his family to California, won the Thelonious Monk competition and inspired awe in senior pianists such as Chick Corea.

As is often the way, this musical emigre has found that distance lends an unexpected enchantment to his native roots. You could feel them pulling right from the start of this gig, which drew on material from his recent album A Fable. Hamasyan has become fascinated by the folk music of Armenia, which in his hands sounds more Balkan than near Eastern, turning round and round a plangent modal note with folk-like obsessiveness.

Hamasyan is a slight, narrow-shouldered, darkly intense figure, who often sings as he bends low over the keyboard. Much of the time he focuses on the mid-range of the piano, as if unconsciously echoing the limitations of folk instruments. Then he remembers he’s actually playing the piano and the hands shoot away into Bud-Powell like flares of virtuosity, or freeze on sudden moments of luminous stillness where the piano rings like a bell.

This evocation of a distance from something longed-for is sharpened by his subtle harmonic sense, which often gestures towards Chopin’s mazurka-melancholy and Bartok’s folk arrangements. He loves to suck the marrow from a particular interval, placing it in different contexts to reveal its many implications. The sense of fixity this brings is hard to escape.

Hamasyan was some minutes into My Prince will Come before he found a jazz-like flexibility.

At moments like this it becomes clear that Hamasyan does have a real jazz sensibility after all, something which until that point you might have doubted (as some of the disgruntled jazz fans here clearly did). In his efforts to catch something wild he sometimes pushes those circling folkish patterns too far, and the awkward join between the two halves of his musical persona sometimes shows.

But the occasional discomforts are a price well worth paying. There are many brilliant and perfectly finished young jazz pianists around, but Hamasyan stands out because he has something important and urgent to say. - The Telegraph

Tigran Hamasyan is a 25-year-old Armenian-born pianist brought up in LA. He has already won some big jazz-piano prizes, and the fact he looks like a young Bob Dylan probably won't do his prospects any harm, either. Listening to his account of Someday My Prince Will Come on this mostly solo set – a mix of Chick Corea's gliding touch and his own darker melodic atmosphere – it isn't hard to tell why Hamasyan floored the judges. That's the only jazz standard on this set, however, the rest being folk originals or pieces influenced by his Armenian childhood. Fans of Avishai Cohen will warm to this newcomer's song-rooted melodic sense: he likes embroidering gentle folk melodies with dazzling instrumental variations and lilting singing. The songs unfold over rolling ostinato patterns or climax in chord clamours, and some are wistful and mystical. A few are ecstatic dances, such as the galloping Carnaval, and the vivacious Kakavik (The Little Partridge) with its tireless left-hand propulsion. Hamasyan can be jazzier and more improv-oriented than on this autobiographical journey, and A Fable may veer toward the fey for some. But stories from this year's Montreux festival of his performance augur very well for his future. - theguardian

26-year old Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan takes old Armenian folk themes and turns them into modern piano pieces. He plays amazing romantic solos, but also improvises funky tunes and sings along with his own piano solos. A winner of the ‘Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition’, he recorded his breakthrough album ‘A Fable’ in 2011. He loves to explore many different types of music, has made major strides in the past few years and has received praise from masters such as Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau and Chick Corea. This young man is clearly on the threshold of a major career.

With the support of the IJFO (International Jazz Organisation – IJFO.org), Tigran – artist in residence at Jazz Middelheim – will play in three different line-ups:

Thursday August 15 – 5.30 p.m.: Tigran with Jan Bang & Arve Henriksen
Friday August 16 – 3.30 p.m.: Tigran & Trilok Gurtu
Saturday August 17 – 7.30 p.m.: Tigran Quartet Shadow Theater
- Jazz Middelheim

On Wednesday night, I finally made it back to my favorite LA jazz club, blue whale. Pianist Tigran Hamasyan was playing a solo show, and I knew that it was going to be something that I’d regret missing. So I carpooled with two friends, Alyssa Mathias and Kristin Gierman, to check it out—and we sure weren’t disappointed! Rather than write a straight-ahead review, though, I thought I’d try something different: an improvised concert review. So after the set, I fired up my audio recorder in the car, we asked each other questions about the set, and I transcribed the result. Check it out after the jump, lightly edited, minus our typically Angeleno debate over which freeways to take home:

These two were a great pair of discussants: Alyssa is a singer, violinist, and MA/PhD student in ethnomusicology at UCLA studying music of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Armenian music has been a particular interest for her — Hamasyan is Armenian — so she heard this set from a unique perspective. Kristin is a filmmaker and yoga teacher with wide-ranging musical tastes — not to mention a superb chauffeur!

We arrived partway into Tigran’s first set, and stayed for the rest of the night. Hamasyan added a sprawling electronic rig to his piano halfway through, giving him a wider sonic palette for the second part of the evening.

Here’s what we had to say about the show:

AWR: I don’t know about you guys, but that last tune where he was beatboxing over himself playing a piano groove . . . I’ve never heard anything like that before, the extreme virtuosity.

AM: Yeah, I’m curious—I’m not too familiar with jazz since 1970, so I have no idea how novel the sort of stuff he was doing was.

AWR: What I noticed from the very beginning of this first set was how precisely he was subdividing rhythms and creating rhythmic contrast. In that first set, he was just hinting at it with his piano stuff, but then when he got his electronics out it was even more intense. I think there’s something to that vibe he was doing—some of it is an extension of the experimental things that fusion guys were doing in the ‘70s, but it’s in conversation with EDM kind of stuff in a way that I really haven’t heard—in a way that my jazz nerd ears were just freaking out the whole time. I think that has to do with his rhythmic concept. He has a ridiculous command of how to put rhythms in conversation with each other. That is a hallmark of what jazz musicians have always done, but he’s doing it in a different kind of beat context.

AM: Yeah, it was cool that he wasn’t just laying down a beat and then going with it—he was really messing with it, in a way that would sort of throw you off but then he’d get right back on.

AWR: You were saying after the second tune in the second set that he’s basically doing a gospel thing with Armenian church music.

AM: Yeah, that was so cool! So he starts out with this church hymn—or a part of the liturgical service—and he takes this little part of it, and before you know it, it has this gospel vibe!

AWR: I think that same sort of zoomed-in rhythmic command that the modern gospel guys really nail, it was that same kind of sensibility that he was putting in his sound.

AM: And I think if you’re going to do something crazy to Armenian liturgical music, which really hasn’t seen a lot of change for centuries, you have to mix it with something that’s going to make sense, even if you’re changing it dramatically. If he was just turning it into an EDM piece, or hip hop, that might not necessarily be appropriate. But the fact that he was drawing on other religious music, other Christian music, made that experimentation a lot more meaningful. I think the audience would appreciate that more, and it was a largely Armenian audience.

AWR: Yeah, and not just the Armenian thing—a lot of jazz musicians talk about how the music has its roots in the church, and that’s what it’s about, you know? And it seems like he was tapping into that, too—some kind of mixture of those two spiritual roots, that was really interesting.

Also, I’m curious: right after we got there, the second tune that he did was a treatment of an Armenian folk tune—how did that contrast or was it similar to what he did there [with the church song]?

AM: Yeah, that tune is on one of his CDs, Red Hail, and there are quite a few Armenian folk songs that he takes—folk songs that were “approved” by the people who were classifying them in the 19th century. His treatment of those songs seems to have a wider range of emotional intensity, or at least he takes advantage of a lot more harmonic and dynamic possibilities, than in the liturgical piece. Also, part of me is like, “okay, you’re an Armenian jazz musician, so why do you have to do an Armenian folk song?” I’d love to talk with him and ask him why he chooses to do those songs, but jazz musicians improvise on standards, and an Armenian folk tune can fill that role. Others have done that before him—I feel like th - Lubricity

It's not often Trilok Gurtu finds himself upstaged. For more than three decades, the Mumbai-born percussionist has been one of the most charismatic figures in jazz, always surrounded by a kit that looks like the contents of Aladdin's cave. If drum solos are often an excuse for the audience to visit the bar, with Gurtu they are the centrepiece to the show – a sonic voyage using tablas, gongs, box drums, rattles, cowbells, shells and even a bucket of water. But tonight, from the moment he was joined on stage by the 24-year-old Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan, eyes were fixed elsewhere.

Dressed in black and looking like a young Bob Dylan, Tigran placed his stool away from the piano and bent double while playing, his forehead almost touching the keys. He mumbled into a microphone while soloing; occasionally beat-boxing over the funkier tracks, sometimes singing wordless, hymn-like compositions.

This performance – featuring two short solo performances and a lengthy duet – served as Hamasyan's London debut and showcased A Fable, his first album on the Verve label. However, where that LP comprises quiet, Satie-esque miniatures, here Gurtu pushed Tigran into wilder territory.

His piano style is strongly rooted in traditional Armenian music. Tonight's show opened with a fellow Armenian playing folk songs on the oboe-like duduk, and you can see the link between those haunting melodies and the melismatic phrases Tigran plays with his right hand. But, egged on by Gurtu's rabble-rousing percussion, he also dipped into Keith Jarrett-style gospel, country and funk.

The duet was a little rough around the edges, but it was a chaotic, exhausting, unrepeatable show that pushed two very different talents to their limits.
- theguardian

It's not often Trilok Gurtu finds himself upstaged. For more than three decades, the Mumbai-born percussionist has been one of the most charismatic figures in jazz, always surrounded by a kit that looks like the contents of Aladdin's cave. If drum solos are often an excuse for the audience to visit the bar, with Gurtu they are the centrepiece to the show – a sonic voyage using tablas, gongs, box drums, rattles, cowbells, shells and even a bucket of water. But tonight, from the moment he was joined on stage by the 24-year-old Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan, eyes were fixed elsewhere.

Dressed in black and looking like a young Bob Dylan, Tigran placed his stool away from the piano and bent double while playing, his forehead almost touching the keys. He mumbled into a microphone while soloing; occasionally beat-boxing over the funkier tracks, sometimes singing wordless, hymn-like compositions.

This performance – featuring two short solo performances and a lengthy duet – served as Hamasyan's London debut and showcased A Fable, his first album on the Verve label. However, where that LP comprises quiet, Satie-esque miniatures, here Gurtu pushed Tigran into wilder territory.

His piano style is strongly rooted in traditional Armenian music. Tonight's show opened with a fellow Armenian playing folk songs on the oboe-like duduk, and you can see the link between those haunting melodies and the melismatic phrases Tigran plays with his right hand. But, egged on by Gurtu's rabble-rousing percussion, he also dipped into Keith Jarrett-style gospel, country and funk.

The duet was a little rough around the edges, but it was a chaotic, exhausting, unrepeatable show that pushed two very different talents to their limits.
- theguardian

The Armenian piano wunderkind Tigran Hamasyan is here to play from Fable, an album he released on Verve 18 months ago when he was only 22 years old. It's a debut that leaves you clutching at references. Like Bartók, he takes ancient folk themes from his home country and twists them into complex modernist miniatures. Like Liszt, he writes romantic piano solos with a sparkling right hand; like Keith Jarrett, he improvises funky gospel tunes, humming along with his own solos.

However, after a fruitful session for Gilles Peterson's show, Tigran seems keen to try new things. Indeed, for much of tonight's concert, he doesn't touch the piano at all. Arriving on stage dressed like an eccentric waiter (red bow tie, black waistcoat, 1950s quiff, fulsome beard) he leans towards the microphone, starts humming, and composes an a cappella song on the spot – Jamie Lidell style – using a digital delay unit to loop several layers of harmonies. Later he uses the same method to improvise a squelchy dubstep track, with fellow Armenian Gayanée Movsisyan providing operatic vocals.

Even playing solo piano, every track has a pulse running through it, but that pulse is implied rather than crudely stated. On a harmonically complicated version of the old Disney standard Someday My Prince Will Come, Tigran shifts seamlessly from jazz waltz to ragtime, from piano-pounding freakout to gentle lullaby, without ever losing that pulse.

Tigran could probably play absolutely anything on the piano but, crucially, he limits himself to only playing things he can sing. All that mumbling along as he plays keeps him in check. Where so much contemporary jazz can be a dreary display of muscle memory, Tigran has found a way to keep improvisation fresh and lyrical. Other jazz musicians would be wise to take note. - theguardian