Improvisations from the Doyen of Kurdish Nay

Shaho Andalibi, Chris Pruden, and Scott Peterson present Trio Andalibi – Improvisations from the Doyen of Kurdish Nay

Shaho Andalibi (ney)
Scott Peterson (bass)
Chris Pruden (piano)

Release Date: March 28th, 2025

ink Music Lab’s artistic vision aims to place itself at the forefront of contemporary multiculturalism in Toronto. This means creating an environment for creative experimentation, a laboratory for innovation, fusing artistic modes together, and offering both artists and listeners a chance to engage with new Canadian works that result from these collaborations.

All of Shaho’s life he’s been deeply influenced by mysticism and Kurdish music, and with this album he’s finally exploring this musical foundation of his with his own creative compass. This collection of works is a culmination of all that Shaho has learned and specialized in throughout his musical life. He’s collected motifs usually used in traditional Iranian folk songs. Here those

melodies are being interpolated through his teachings to his two musical collaborators, resulting in something both truly unique and simultaneously more accessible to Western audiences, while still very much serving as a definitive statement of his musical

identity.

The forms of this traditional repertoire aren’t easy for those unfamiliar with the idiom to understand, but he wanted to see what interpretations could arise without knowledge of these forms being pre-ingrained. The form in these pieces can be compared to a butterfly that’s struggling to fly, and finally succeeds, but then again it lands, and tries to fly yet again. So in

other words there’s lots of movement. It was initially a challenge to translate the structure of these pieces to non-Iranian musicians, but that was the whole point.

Shaho’s approach to this cross-cultural sharing process was well thought out in that he carefully chose the order in which to introduce the pieces to be performed to his collaborators so they could gradually gain an understanding of how to go about both comping and improvising on these motifs.