Mamak Khadem
The Road (Innova, 2015)
Iranian singer Mamak Khadem is set to dazzle fans with her latest The Road on the Innova label. Brimming over with Ms. Khadem’s extraordinary vocals, The Road is a musical map crafted out of traditional melodies from Iran, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Fans are treated to a rich, dense tapestry of perfectly intertwined musical influences threaded together by Ms. Khadem’s soaring vocals so that places on the map become simply a musical fantasyland.
Taking on some of The Road’s arrangements with musician and producer Jamshied Sharifi, The Road mesmerizes with a first class lineup of musicians like guitarists Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah, jazz percussionist Mino Cinelu, Macedonia’s brass band Agusevi Dzambo Orkestar, Bulgarian group Pazardjik Ensemble, Persian tombak, dayereh and daf player Pezhham Akhavass and Persian kamancheh player Mehdi Bagheri, as well as a host of other outstanding musicians.
Thick and meaty, The Road is masterful in creating a lush landscape filled to overflowing with flute, table, tar, setar, cello, keyboard, riq, tambur and big bold brass without ever losing its way.
Opening with “A Thousand Strings,” The Road sets listeners off on a musical landscape that is opulent with rich Eastern influences from Iran, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Morocco, Indonesia. “A Thousand Strings” is a heady mix with its flashes of Arab-Andalusia courtesy of guitarists Strunz and Farah, the Bulgarian singers, thrumming percussion and palmas. Well, things just get better with flute laced “Romance” with its celebratory, folksy feel and the Bulgarian singers. The Road takes a delicious turn on “Do, Don’t” with help of the brass band members of Ausevi Dzambo Orkestar.
The Road provides lush track like darkly mysterious “Flaming Sun,” the kamancheh threaded “High Sea,” the sweetly delicate “Little Gem” and the exotically delicious “Stardust” and “Huntsman.”
Ms. Khadem pulls out all the stops on The Road and conjures up an imaginative, eclectic musical fantasy world that well worth the ride.
Purchase The Road in North America
Purchase The Road in Europe
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
