Lennox Theatre, August 31
9/10
On a day when mobs demonstrated against immigration, particularly the non-white variety, Hamed Sadeghi offered the perfect riposte. Not that this was his intention: he merely works towards refining his gentle art. But for a decade he’s enriched Australian music, bringing Iran’s ancient culture to our ears via his reflective and evocative compositions, his assemblages of musicians and his own playing on the Persian tar.
Northern Rhapsody, the album he was launching, is the latest from Eishan Ensemble, the band with which he first sprang to prominence, and which he’s gradually honed to a quartet of alto saxophonist Michael Avgenicos, double bassist Max Alduca and percussionist Adem Yilmaz. Conceptually, the new compositions draw on his Australian experiences and observations, the upshot being that they are sometimes populated with fewer notes and broader horizons.
This is music you don’t so much listen to as bathe in. The melodies float on the rhythmic buoyancy, and you sit there mesmerised by the sounds and the relationships between the instruments. The combination of tar and alto saxophone is a singular one: when they play a unison melody, the tar, with its metallic, banjo-like bite, gilds the edge of each saxophone note, so they sound like one instrument, with more attack than a saxophone, more sustain than a tar.
Avgenicos was astutely restrained, mostly playing slippery, almost evasive lines, at one with the prevailing candle-lit aesthetic and the music’s innate elegiac poeticism. Just when you wanted extra vigour, on Expressive Orient he broadened his sound and played more expansively, with the tar offering trilling asides.
Most of Sadeghi’s solos and introductions carried a profound melancholy, as of one who’s seen too much of the world before his time. But always he is a natural painter of pictures and teller of stories. His is not an easy instrument on which to do this. Having such bright attack and fast decay, the artistry is deeply embedded in shaping each note’s brief moment of sustain.
Another side to the music, that keeps it a dialogue between moods as well as between instruments, is the vibrancy of the rhythms, with Alduca and Yilmaz closely attuned, and their timing impeccable. The former generally anchored the compositions with riffs or ostinatos, which were then elaborated upon and decorated by Yilmaz, who’s the fizz in the bottle and the drama underscoring the soliloquies. Sometimes he played with mallets, but mostly with his hands, and his combination of cajon, hand-drums, a little snare, cymbals and hi-hat made for an opulence of sounds and textures such as most regular kit drummers could only dream of. On Black and White he also sang, with an arresting purity of tone.
Finally, a word about the venue, because this was apparently the last regular concert (or play) in the Lennox Theatre. The sound (as ever) was exceptional and the sense of intimacy pervasive. It’s a room that will be missed.