Empty Voices
9/10
What a shrewd way to draw you in. Hamed Sadeghi begins Empty Voices with a musical supplication, simply entitled Please. Lasting only two-and-a-half minutes, it sets Sadeghi’s ringing tar (a steel-stringed Persian lute) against a simple drone, and yet the sense of entreaty is palpable – as if he’s appealing to you to listen.
By the time the rest of the band quietly enters for the ensuing Taarof, you’re already hooked: drawn into this poetic world Sadeghi has created, in which his tar meditates amid instruments and musicians more usually associated with jazz. But to call the music a hybrid would be to demean it. It’s more an idiom all of its own: unique in concept and execution. Having unveiled the project at last year’s Sydney Festival, Sadeghi has now refined it, and the results are consistently mesmerising.
The septet includes bassist Lloyd Swanton (of The Necks), with whom Sadeghi is well-used to playing in the trio Vazesh. But where that project deals exclusively in improvisations, this one is based on the Iranian-Australian’s compositions. Caressing rather than assaulting the ears, these are laced with solos from some of this country’s most distinguished improvisers: saxophonists Sandy Evans and Michael Avgenicos, bass clarinettist Paul Cutlan, trumpeter Thomas Avgenicos and percussionist Adem Yilmaz.
A striking element of their art is the proliferation of air and space. It’s as if all the sounds are transparent, allowing you to hear the instruments through each other. Yet despite everyone being on a tight leash in terms of density and dynamics, there’s no sense of the collective creativity being constrained. Evans’ soprano saxophone still cries in its gull-like way, and Cutlan still produces one of the most haunting sounds you’ll hear on bass clarinet. Mother Tongue is underpinned by an instantly-involving groove that suggests journeying for the delight of journeying, rather than a burning need to reach a destination, with Evans’ soprano spiralling high above the expedition.
For all the prayer-like pensiveness, Sadeghi is too wise a conceptualist not to build dramatic undulations into the album as a whole. Inherited Accidentally develops a rousing refrain, for instance, before dropping away to a sparse, contemplative solo from Yilmaz, full of subtle textural shifts from his cosmopolitan array of instruments. The use of drones, especially Swanton’s bowed bass, is a recurrent feature, and, with part of Sadeghi’s compositional inspiration coming from Sufi mysticism, they deepen the perception of the music being somehow sacred, like so many voices singing in a consecrated place where music is the religion. This impression reaches its apotheosis on The Joy of Solitude, although having established this mood, Sadeghi then lets Avegenicos’s trumpet soar briefly, as if reaching up to some vaulted ceiling. The album is rounded out by the surprisingly visceral Bittersweet, the title encapsulating the feeling of reaching the end of a sonic voyage that has been so enthralling.