Dawar

Description

Depuis près de 40 ans et un certain enregistrement soliste pour Harmonia Mundi, Djamchid Chemirani (né à Téhéran en 1942) a poursuivi son cheminement avec, à ses côtés, deux fils : Keyvan et Bijan. Chacun a fait sa culture, parcouru divers univers sonores, nourri son métier de musicien. Mais ils n'ont eu de cesse de revenir au grand oeuvre commun : élaborer une langue rythmique universelle. Dawâr, c'est le bout du chemin : jamais encore les Chemirani n'avaient atteint unetelle limpidité du son issu de la fusion de leurs trois frappes ; c'est par la conscience jubilatoire de l'oeuvre engendré ensemble, qu'ils rejoignent l'expérience spirituelle si présente dans la culture iranienne. Cet album inaugure une ligne éditoriale Harmonia Mundi spécifiquement consacrée aux musiques classiques du monde. "The sounds of the Chemirani speak to us. Someone is talking to us. If we listen for real, cultured or not, we will feel that we are being addressed. We will feel that we are being spoken to, and even that a response is expected from us. The Chemirani speak to everyone. It is not so simple, using percussion. As striking tools, percussion can overwhelm us. Their uses have served formidable powers, military powers, like those of the drum majors of the French Guards or the drums of the Ottoman Sultan; on the contrary, the articulation of sounds set up by the Chemirani recalls the articulation of spoken language. One can hear in the background the scansion of a language, and the call for a response. The breath, the short and long notes, the pitches evolving within a restricted ambitus, the intonations, all these elements are those of a language. The zarb is a particularly docile instrument: it serves wonderfully as a substitute for language with sounds that are alternately clear, soft, hissing, precisely struck, scraped on the skin, scratched on the barrel... Here we are being spoken to from music, but also from a language. These percussions certainly evoke a masked song; but they also evoke a spoken language - it would almost be enough to scratch for it to appear. It happens that at Royaumont, we were able to follow in a privileged way the gestation of this music-language of the Chemirani. A founding gesture, that of Djamchid Chemirani: it is enough to close your eyes to see him again in the refectory of the monks of the abbey (2003): he chants with his deep and well-timbred voice a poem by Rumi in Persian, and tiles this scansion with the same rhythm that passes to the zarb as soon as the voice falls silent: a luminous demonstration of the deep links between voice and percussive gesture through language. It is this scansion that rocked Keyvan and Bijan in their childhood. Today, Dawâr appears as the enchanting result of this long journey together. Never before had the Chemirani achieved such clarity of sound resulting from the fusion of their three strikes; never had they presented their sound world with such freshness, and provoked such a strong feeling of obviousness. Djamchid's scansion regularly reinitiates the play of three. Everything revolves around the zarbs, with the daf introducing into the percussion the rupture of timbre, and the plucked strings of the saz played by Bijan and the santur played by Keyvan intermittently creating in the background a majestic and dreamy sound spectrum." Frédéric Deval