YAVARAN

MUSIC FACEBOOK

[conradtao]

I have seen my records in the ‘world’ section because I’m from Iceland. ‘World music,’ what is that? Everything except the US and Britain? The majority of the planet but kinda second class? Like naïve music? I have had to deal with the elfin naïve nonsense stamp all my life and I have never seen an elf and I don’t think I’m naïve. If I was from Boston making the same music, I wouldn’t be called naïve.

Björk (x)

[salemrashid-deactivated20150815]

[thischarmingcharlie]

[yavaran]

Frontier Blues (2009)

[v0chinch]

Today, I went to an Armenian village, Mirzovka, and visited its incredibly old, wooden school. There are 60 students in the school. Except for Georgian language, everything is taught in Armenian…oh, and there are five Azerbaijani students. There are places that exist like this. Places that if you ask an Azeri 3rd grader, “How do you play with the Armenian children?”, she looks at you funny and says in Armenian simply, “We just play.”

An Armenia Peace Corps Volunteer and friend (via vochinch)

[yavaran]

'سی کن با مردان دانا بنشین یا با صنم لطیف را نا بنشین ز این هر دو اگر با تو میسر نشود در خانه خمار تو با ما بنشین -ترانه محلکی تاجیکی '

Try to sit with wise men Or try to sit with beautiful ones If neither of these two are possible Come sit in our house of ruin

-Tajik Folk poem

[yavaran]

yum

[universalcuisines]

Chee kufta, Turkish çiğ köfte, literally “raw meat patty” is a raw meat dish in Turkish, very similar to kibbeh nayyeh and to a lesser extent to steak tartare. It is made with either beef or lamb, and usually served as an appetizer in both Armenian and Turkish cuisines.

[yavaran]

Missing Turkey. Missing the Valley. Missing my Armenian friends. Missing Los Angeles. Missing Cig Kofte. 

[tzarbomb-blog]

کاش ما آن دو پرستو بودیم If only we were those two swallows که همه عمر سفر می کردیم That for their whole lives traveled از بهاری From one spring به بهاری دیگر To another

Forough Farrokhzad - گذران  (subsistence)

[yavaran]

New track that I never did a good job of promoting. Arabic. Lo-fi. Trap.

[yavaran]

The new Yavaran live acoustic performance is up. This was filmed in my living room by my good friend Marisa Mito. Just a performance of the classic Azeri song "Getme." Thanks for listening, here's to a good 2014!

[bintbattuta-deactivated20220322]

From The CESS Blog:

Milana Aleksandrovna brought out a very peculiar copy of the Qur’an.  On the horizontal line you see the original text in Arabic, as one expects.  The next line, however, is more surprising: a Slavic translation (somewhere between Polish and Belorussian, according to Frolova’s catalog) of the holy verses and scribed in the Arabic script. Needless to say, very few scholars are trained to work with this sort of text, though Galina Mishkinene of Vilnius University, a specialist in Lithuanian Tatars, has examined this manuscript and others scribed by communities of Tatars in the Baltics and Poland. The majority of the text was written between 1811 and 1825. This particular page begins with verse 7:69.

[farsizaban-deactivated20180323]

Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat, Khuzestan, Iran 

[yavaran]

Been to this. Amazing. Lot of early Iranian religious sites (even a place where sacrifices apparently happened!)

[simyart-deactivated20150613]

Kebab Maker - Iran by uncorneredmarket on Flickr.

[yavaran]

In Defense of "Belly Dance"

So it's really easy to hate "belly dancing" because it's orientalist and blends cultures somewhat haphazardly, but the legacy of it has a place in my heart.

In the 70s and 80s, Los Angeles (and america in general) was filled with a mish mash of Greeks, Arabs, Iranians, Armenians, Assyrians, etc. who found common ground and many a fun night partying away to "belly dance" bands. I owe a lot of my music and my beliefs about how we should love the commonalities in our culture to the experiences my parents had partying it up in those "belly dance" clubs way back when. Why else would an Iranian learn the bouzouki? Listen to those 80s and 70s records. I dare you to find more natural and beautiful "fusion" of all these amazing cultural and musical traditions.

That being said, we don't need belly dance anymore; we are ready to and have begun creating on our terms. But it helped us in a lot of ways and to the many greats that practiced this amazing musical and cultural tradition (like the late George Abdo, pictured here), I am eternally indebted. Thank you for partying.

[yavaran]

This song is being re-dedicated to my Greek class because for some reason I cannot learn the vocabulary for my next quiz. Give me strength~

[yavaran]

New song. Putting together my take on two really great tunes.