Montreal 10/2/2021 - Kiya Tabassian and Constantinople (2021)

ideated from: concert week: a bunch of YT concert videos I’ve saved to a playlist called “good concerts,” which is a bit deceiving since I haven’t listened to most of them.

Kiya Tabassian plays a Persian instrument called a setâr, not to be confused with the similarly named Indian instrument sitar. His Constantinople project sees him playing with a rotating cast of musicians from all over the world, blending their own sounds and traditions into Tabassian’s knowledge of Persian music.

Here Tabassian is joined by kora player Ablaye Cissoko (oddly, not to be confused with an entirely different kora player named Ballaké Sissoko) and percussionist Patrick Graham. They play wonderfully and you can hear the craft and history in their music as they trade off leading the group.

note: i was going to do midjourney images for each of these concerts since there are no album covers per se. I was bitterly disappointed about how the Midjourney model fails to grasp in the slightest a group of musicians who aren’t playing standard western instruments. This aside from the other problems I have getting the model to do what I want. This Photoshop monstrosity is the best I could do.