I hear him wailing in the garden. Shajarian, my father, what’s the difference? His voice is pain compressed into a laser beam, his throat a funnel of mirrors — and then it’s water over rocks. I can’t pinpoint the first time I heard him sing, nor can I name any of his songs, but I hear his voice in my bones, and it’s mixed with my dad’s. I was a kid in the backseat of his Isuzu, window rolled all the way down until it had disappeared into the door — I loved that about those windows — hearing the same Mohammad-Reza Shajarian CD on the stereo for the millionth time, my dad singing along while I jumped my hand over passing cars.
The songs can be long, sometimes over 20 minutes, and meandering. Structure is more cyclical than linear. There is a grounding motif around which the players orbit, and sometimes their circles are tight, other times far flung. And Shajarian solos over them like Coltrane. His voice can resonate like a reed instrument, so tightly buzzing, but then it unspools into tahrir, a Persian form of yodeling that sounds like a pitch bouncing around in a bowl. Eventually, it comes to rest in the center of the basin. At his most masterful, his most tender, he quiets his fretted warbling to a soft murmur, cycling over melodies like a person reminding themself of something as they fall asleep.
As a singer, I’m inspired by the emotion and malleability of his voice. It goes everywhere, and always the heart is breaking in the throat. I will never be able to sing like him, but when I approach a vocal part, I try to sing as shamelessly and plaintively as he does, with as much control, and I try to find ways to showcase the many different tones and textures of the human voice: the booming chest here, the dancing throat there, the round falsetto, the buzzsaw belt and the airy whisper. In college, I sang in a Balkan choir. Many phrases are sung in a vocal style that we called “hard voice,” though I’m not sure what it’s called in the region it comes from, if it even has a name. When I sing in hard voice, I concentrate my voice into a laser beam of sound coming out of the center of my face, from the triangle between my nostrils and my eyes. Harmonies in hard voice are sensational. They sound like tectonic plates shearing against each other, like the air between you is ripping. Hard voice, to me, is like Shajarian: belted and vibrant and flagrant.
As a songwriter, I’m drawn to the epic arcs of his songs, the looseness of their structure. Verse melodies that sound like solos, no repetition. Instruments that chat with each other, chant together in unison, disappear completely. The voice foregrounded and naked. Textures warm and jangly, strings plucked, drums rumbling. I’ve woven snippets of him into my songs since I started making music, from sampling his voice for rap beats to chopping up tombak and daf percussion solos and triggering them under bedroom guitar and soft synths. And when I’m not sampling him, I’m trying to emulate the organic communication between instruments in his songs. In Persian classical music, the musicians sit together on the floor, and you can hear that intimacy in the playing. It’s humble music played close to the ground where you can feel your partner’s vibrations. Even in the DAW, I want the layers of my songs to interlock and interact with each other like they’re in the room together, played live, responding to each other’s runs and rests.
Catchiness is important to me. There’s something magical about a song whose melody scratches some itch you didn’t know you had, a song that makes you keep coming back to hear it again. Shajarian’s songs are catchy, but in a way that feels unfamiliar to my mostly Western-tuned ears. I want my music to feel that way to people, with melodies that hook them but sound foreign, like pop songs heard in an imaginary club in a city that doesn’t exist yet.
When I was a kid, my dad and I road tripped to Yellowstone. Along the way, he had me sing for him, and he told me that the most important thing was to sing with feeling, like the master, Shajarian. It didn’t matter how well I hit the notes or controlled the tone if my voice didn’t communicate emotion. I think that has been my guiding light as a singer and musician. I’m not the best listener. I’m bored by a lot of music, even stuff that is technically dazzling. I can be impatient with instruments. But the voice is my vice, and it has to have edges. It has to bleed like Shajarian’s.
