**The album will be available on November 21, 2025**
Chiaroscuro. Sayeh-Roshan in Persian. This is the theme explored by bassist Ali Kian Yazdanfar and pianist Brigitte Poulin for this album of contemporary compositions for double bass and piano, interspersed with a few traditional pieces (played by Behnoosh Behnamnia on the kamancheh and Bamdad Fotouhi on the tombak). Solo double bass player of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM), Yazdanfar has been multiplying adventures outside his main group for a few years now, such as with the album Iridescence released in 2023.
READ THE REVIEW OF THE ALBUM IRIDESCENCE BY ALI KIAN YAZDANFAR AND FRÉDÉRIC LAMBERT HERE
For Sayeh-Roshan, he and his accomplice Poulin called upon a few Canadian composers of Iranian origin, such as Amir Eslami, Behzad Ranjbaran, Parisa Sabet, and Reza Vali. The music oscillates between modernity and tradition, perhaps an allegory of the play of contrasts between shadow and light. The inflections specific to the harmonic language and Persian musical modes (dastgahs) are well present in the new works, but of course integrated into an expressive and narrative framework closer to Western contemporary music, without going as far as the avant-garde, that is to say. Indeed, the whole is consonant, even though the use of microtonality is of course frequent. Of the program, the most successful work in my opinion was Reza Vali’s Laylâ, Folk Songs, Set No. 18, in which Yazdanfar also has to sing and speak while playing a series of ten very expressive miniatures.
An interesting example of contemporaneity informed by a thousand-year-old tradition.
