Niyaz - Beni Beni
It's another day, another big berfday, and with this one you get a little bit of Story Time with your October festivities.
Maybe you've never heard of today's honoree, but the Story is that I never would have, but for my husband Alex and a past berfday of his.
As he tells it, it was his 12th birthday and iPods had just come out. He wanted one badly badly bad, as any 2002 12-year-old might, but his parents (my in-laws) were chastened by the then-astronomical cost of one.
As a somewhat substitute, they got him a sort of knockoff MP3 player of the time, from when they first came out. The one they got him allowed you to download a bunch of songs, but they were all by unknown artists he had never heard or heard of.
The one Mystery Name he zeroed in on turned out to be today's birthday girl, then as the iPod just beginning her emergence into the mainstream of this thing we dare to call culture.
He got all her available songs that were out then, and instantly fell in love with her. Fast forward, invert some numbers in 2002 and it's 2020, and he and I have just met.
We quickly move in together, and one day -- I can't remember if this was the end of 2020 when we got married or into 2021 -- he strolls in and says Hey! I wanna introduce you to a singer called Azam Ali! And tells me the above story about how he found her.
Now, it ain't easy to stump the professor. There's few artists of our epoch here that you could queue up and I'd be completely, categorically unfamiliar with even their name. Especially someone like this, who between 2002 and 2020 made a whole bunch of recordings with a good few different bands and other players and whatnot.
As the strains of her music wafted through the space like hookah smoke, as clueless as I was, I could but exclaim, "Who the fuck is this?!?". "She's Iranian," he said. Gradually I came to understand how she came to the US in the 1980s and the backstory of her unlikely career in music.
So a great thanks and gratitude aplenty go out to my perpetually wonderful husband, who brought me this incredible vocalist who backstrokes so effortlessly between the ancient Persian and the trance-tastic, mellifluous modern waters to be found in the Sea of Electronica.
I hope your reaction, should you be as unfamiliar as I once was with Azam Ali, and the shimmering, evanescent beauty of what she does -- which is something like The Call To Prayer of the muezzin crossed with, say, the music of the Cocteau Twins in their Peter Gabriel bag, except the words are all in Urdu or Farsi and are all about how all Love is Divine -- will be along similar, WTF is this?! kinda lines.
Niyaz
Festival International de Louisiane
Legends Bar & Grill
Lafayette, Luisiana USA
4.27.2018
01 introduction
02 Yek Nazar (A Single Glance)
03 Tam e Eshq (The Taste of Love)
04 unidentified title
05 Beni Beni
06 Aurat (Woman)
07 unidentified title
08 Shir Ali Mardan (Song of a Warrior)
09 Aramada Sormadalar Beni/Azam Ali speaks
10 unidentified title
Total time: 1:09:25
Azam Ali - vocals
Loga Ramin Torkian - oud & kamaan
Gabriel Ethier - electronics & keyboards
Dimitris Petzalakis - kaval & kopuz
Ravi Naimpally - tabla
matrix of two different HD YouTube soundtracks, extracted from video captures of the event
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, matrixed, assembled, tracked & remastered by EN, September 2025
393 MB FLAC/direct link
393 MB FLAC/direct link
OK, now a word about what I did with the music -- and apologies for failing to be able to identify three of the tunes -- which was a little on the nutbag side of the gated hospice for the terminally obsessed, even for me.
There are unfortunately no ROIOs of Azam Ali or her (yes, they are sublime, as you'll hear) band Niyaz, save a couple of talk-heavy radio spots and a few not-so-well-captured concerts that are on YouTube in HD. I took the audio from two distinct, pro-shot recordings of one of them from 2018 -- where one was more soundboard-y and the other more audience-heavy -- and matrixed them up in a pleasing configuration without phase cancellation, making them (IMO) into something more than what they were on their own.
Then I broke the result apart in Audacity using the stem separator in there, excavating the mostly-buried vocals that you need to be able to hear for the thing to be what it's supposed to be and represent: that is, a vocalist at the peak of her considerable powers, mesmerizing a roomful of largely uninitiated and (at first) sub-attentive audients with what's coming out of her mouth. Once reassembled and remastered/sonically optimized, it wasn't perfect -- the band is still kind of hazy and less-than-distinct behind her -- but somewhat more than the sum of its kinda-crappily-captured parts.
Anyway, it's her 55th birthday today, so I thought I would make the extra effort and sneak this in before midnight in honor of Azam Ali, as enchanting and beguiling a singer as I've gotten to discover -- thanks to my huggable hubs!!! -- in the last five years of living!--J.
