"Black Narcissus"

Behrooz Mihankhah

Behrooz Mihankhah is Iranian-Canadian composer, pianist, and songwriter born in Tehran, Iran, and based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His debut album, Lydium, takes impressionist and jazz compositions and presents them in an Iranian instrumental context. Inspired by his migrations though Iran and India and, finally, to Canada, the collection fuses musical traditions of the past with contemporary concepts of composition and improvisation to create something entirely new.

“This is an arrangement based on the composition ‘Black Narcissus’ by American jazz saxophonist and composer Joe Henderson. In this recording, I wanted to recreate one of my favourite jazz standards and present it in a traditional Iranian style using the the tombak (Iranian percussion instrument) and the tar (string instrument). This style is associated with dance in Iran and worked perfectly here because I wanted to write an arrangement that is somewhat a representation of my influences and experiences as a musician. In this arrangement, I feature vocabulary and instrumentation from Iranian folk and traditional music (where I’m from) while utilizing a western contemporary harmonic form (the music I have studied).”