Ghazal: Lost Songs of the Silk Road

Kayhan Kalhor, Shujaat Husain Khan, Swapan Chaudhuri

album cover

A Lost Language of Soul Mates

The "silk road" refers to the extended overland routes that crisscrossed Eurasia and China, linking Persia and India and helping the spread of commerce. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, during Pathan and Mongol dynastic invasions, many cultures, including those of India and Persia, brushed against each other on the road. This is audible in these countries' music: Though the basic foundations of Indian raga and Persian dastgah are different, instrumentalists in both strive for the same thing—to replicate the writhing, heart-tugging sounds made by human voices.

The connection between these geographically separated styles is celebrated on the hypnotic Lost Songs of the Silk Road, a collaboration that has the sweep of an epic journey and the transporting power of trance music. Using microtonal clusters, exotic scales, and extravagant pitch-bending swerves, Kayhan Kalhor (the Iranian-born master of the Persian violin kamancheh), Indian sitarist Shujaat Husain Khan, and tabla drummer Swapan Chaudhuri create music that makes these distantly linked traditions seem like they belong organically together.

Lost Songs can be appreciated for its grand melodic gestures, with instrumentalists swooning like women swept up in the rapture of love. It's also an intense lesson in improvisation—Kalhor and Khan trade explosive rhetorical declarations while staying within a general mood. In this music, an ad-libbed phrase can call for abrupt changes in tempo, bursts of lashing stringed fury, or outright cries of agony. One vivid example comes near the end of the nineteen-minute "Saga of the Rising Sun," when the three gradually shift from a brisk pulse to a slow one. They've been cruising along on a delicately interlocked rhythm and suddenly hit some traffic, so they gradually slow things up, into a majestic, carefully coordinated processional that defies notation. It's stunning.

Genre: World, India, Iran
Released: 1998, Shanachie
Key Tracks: "Saga of the Rising Sun," "Come with Me"
Catalog Choice: The Rain
Next Stop: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble: When Strangers Meet
Book Page: 417