The Kurdish-Canadian Kamānche player, composer and singer Shahriyar Jamshidi returns to the Canadian Music Centre stage with a new music and special project to feature one of the talented Kurdish female voices “Hezil”.
A colourful collection of the vocal sounds of Nomad Kurdish Music is chosen from the Zagros Mountains (a mountain range located in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey) foothills through the Çiyayê Agirî (Ararat) mountain (a snow-capped and dormant compound volcano in Eastern Turkey) area which includes diverse musical themes shaped by the diversification of the cultures in the region – will be presented in solo kamānche pieces, the Dengbêjî (Storytelling) vocals and Strāns (songs) at Canadian Music Centre.
The Dengbêjî vocal form is categorized as the complicated solo vocal Kurdish form and mostly men’s musical territory indeed only a small group of Kurdish male vocalists are capable of performing the Dengbêjî genre. Hezil will sing the Dengbêjî music with the accompaniment of Kamānche to celebrate Kurdish WOMEN’s art and the rich culture of Kurdistan.
Hezil is the Kurdish singer from Northern Kurdistan “Bakûr” born in Turkey. “My journey has led me through cultural institutions and artistic collectives, where I’ve shared songs rooted in the ancient soil of Mesopotamia. While Kurdish is the core of my expression, I sing in many tongues—each one a thread in the rich tapestry of this timeless land.”
Shahriyar Jamshidi is renowned for his creative and masterful kamānche improvisations, both as a soloist and in ensembles. He has been focused on reconnecting the community to the omitted musical ethnicity of the Kurds by representing original musical contexts in my compositions and my Kamānche recitals on every stage to fill the cultural divide and pass the inner view of Indigenous Kurdish music to the next generation in a comprehensible language to preserve that culture. Since settling in Canada in 2012, Shahriyar has consistently sought new musical languages, thereby crossing cultures by reverberating his Kamānche recitals at the Canadian Opera Company; Windsor and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra; Amsterdam Cello Biennial; Sound Symposium XXI and the University of Glasgow. His latest released album “My Sunset-Land Rojava” is dedicated to all resistance women who lost their lives to liberate KOBANE (Western Kurdistan, ROJAVA in Syria) and contributed to the suffered Yazidi women from the 2015 ethnic cleansing in Iraq.
