Tigran Hamasyan – review

Dazzling polyrhythms … Tigran Hamasyan at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns via Getty Images

John Fordham
The Guardian, Wednesday 20 November 2013 16.08 GMT
Not since the days of the anthemic finales and light-show theatricals of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio has a stage in the London jazz festival vibrated with so much pop-jazz energy as was unleashed on Tuesday by the 26-year-old Armenian Tigran Hamasyan. Like the late-lamented Svensson, Hamasyan is a jazz pianist who composes like a songwriter and is influenced by his homeland's folk music.

He's also a pop and dance fan who loves seeing audiences jumping in the air rather than tapping jazz-savvy feet. But Hamasyan really does turn it all the way up to 11 (he liked Black Sabbath as a child, and it shows) and – at least in his current stage show – keeps his huge pianistic and improv gifts tightly under wraps. This week's London jazz festival gig had less light and shade than the Armenian's new Shadow Theater album) and focused on a heavy dancefloor vibe. But if some jazz fans who had been drawn by Herbie Hancock's or Brad Mehldau's embrace of Hamasyan eventually found themselves thinking "please make it stop", plenty others were audibly happy for the show to go on all night.

The gifted Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni opened the gig with her UK debut, delivering a coolly emotional, flawlessly pitched fusion of jazz phrasing and Albanian folk music with pianist Colin Vallon's trio: her return can't come too soon. Hamasyan then bounded on stage to mash the folk theme, dazzling polyrhythms and crunching backbeats of Shadow Theater's Drip.

He combined the nursery-song simplicity of The Poet with a hard-hitting funk groove, a folk theme and a swooping Charles Altura guitar break, and let his fine singer/keyboardist Areni Agbabian's glowing vocals sustain the rootsy feel in a mercurial, heavily electronic mix. The agile Agbabian began to dart and scat like a Balkan Flora Purim on The Year Is Gone. If Hamasyan's festival-commissioned piece was a perfunctory mix of a pretty piano theme and a headbanging groove, the set's climax – with its squelching, subterranean monster-bass dance hook and jackknifing synths – showed just how he adores contemporary music at its most visceral.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/20/tigran-hamasyan-review

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

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 Rós, 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 player Dhafer 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").
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/24/tigran-hamasyan-pianist-jazz-armenian

Jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan performs at Morocco Festival for Gnawa

PanARMENIAN.Net - Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan made a performance at the 14th Festival for Gnawa, an annual celebration of the traditional music based in Essaouria, Morocco.

Hamasyan, who first began performing festival jazz at the age of 12, went on to study American jazz and Armenian music as a protégé of Herbie Hancock.

The Essaouira Festival for Gnawa and World Music has achieved a great success since its first edition in 1998. It is enjoying now enjoying wolrdwide fame and popularity after celebrating its 10th birthday last summer and bringing approximately half a million visitors from all regions of Morocco and globally.

For 10 years, the Essaouira festival for Gnawa and World Music has been a meeting place for many musical styles; Jazz, Blues, Rock, African percussions, Gnawa and all the Moroccan folklore.

From: http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/73780/