Other sounds 2: Vazesh

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in Vazesh, a trio in which he’s joined by two Aussies, the saxophonist and clarinetist Jeremy Rose and the bassist Lloyd Swanton.

Their first album, released in 2021, was a live recording at Sydney Opera House and won awards. Its successor, Tapestry, was recorded during a single night of improvisation at an arts centre in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney. Just under an hour long, Tapestry seems to be an unbroken performance, although on the sleeve it’s divided into 14 tracks, each jointly credited and given a single-word title that might be the result of a game in which the three members contributed their favourite words: “Lilac”, “Pagoda”, “Calabash”, “Demitasse”, “Musk” and so on.

It’s a beautiful and unclassifiable record. The individual sounds are exquisite — the tar strummed and plucked with a tiny hint of twang, the reeds (bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones) elegant, the double bass resonant (Swanton, of course, is also one-third of the Necks). But the point is the sense of conversation, ebbing and flowing without rhetoric or exhibition meditative but never passive. When musicians from different cultures can do this together, with so much ease and naturalness, maybe we’re not in such a terrible state after all.

* Vazesh’s Tapestry is released on October 25 on the Earshift Music label: https://vazesh.bandcamp.com/album/tapestry