From Iran to Australia: Intercultural Encounters in Music

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the experiences of four performing artists, vocalist Tara Tiba, saz player and guitarist Reza Mirzaei, daf and ney player Esfandiar Shahmir and tar player Hamed Sadeghi, who have moved from Iran to Australia, where they now live and work. It traces their respective journeys of migration and career development in their new country. In particular, it explores their collaborations with Australian-born jazz musicians, and how this has affected their music. Through a series of informal interviews with these musicians, this article examines their lived experience of working as musicians in Australia, and how intercultural collaborations have impacted their creative output. It finds that nuanced intercultural approaches have been crucial to the success and the nature of the music they create.

KEYWORDS:

• Persian
• Jazz
• Music
• Iran
• Australia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Esfandiar Shahmir, Hamed Sadeghi, Reza Mirzaei and Tara Tiba for sharing their personal experiences, stories, and music. The author would also like to thank Dr Gay Breyley who provided comments on an earlier form of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Saz refers to a Turkish instrument, also known as the baglama, which is a long necked fretted lute. The term saz is the family name of a range of stringed instruments, and in Persian means ‘to make’. Mirzaei refers to his instrument as saz, which he has uniquely modified from the baglama, and this is the terminology used throughout this article.

2 The oud is a fretless lute, played throughout the world, especially in East and North Africa, across the Mediterranean, and in West Asia.

3 The term ‘world music’ is problematic, but is still widely used to describe cross-cultural music. The term was coined in the 1980s as a marketing ploy by record companies to describe the vast genres of non-Western music that did not fit into other (Western) categories (Jordan 2010).

4 Microtones are intervals smaller than a semitone (the smallest interval between two notes in Western music), utilised in musical cultures that use unequal-tempered modal systems. The term ‘quarter tone’ is avoided as it is misleading, as intervals are not exact.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Pass

Kate Pass is a casual academic at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University.