Nowruz Festival
March 17 and 18, 2024
Jazz Club Moods
Nowruz Festival
The second edition of the Nowruz festival at Moods brings together an extraordinary and diverse group of musicians. Spanning over two days, we'll celebrate the arrival of spring on Sunday, March 17, and Monday, March 18, 2024, with keynotes on «Music of Resilience: Women's Singing in Iran, Afghanistan and Kurdistan», concerts by the Inner Unity Ensemble, Sakina Teyna, and the Golnar Quintet.
Line Up 17.03.2024
19:00 Keynote by Yalda Yazdani
Music of Resilience: Women's Singing in Iran, Afghanistan and Kurdistan
20:00 Concert by Inner Unity Ensemble & Sakina Teyna
Yalda Yazdani (Curator, Keynote Speaker), Mahan Mirarab (Music Director, Guitar), Samin Ghorbani ( Vocals), Sakina Teyna (Vocals), Shabnam Parvaresh (Clarinet), Uygur Vural (Cello), Valentina Bellanova (Ney), Amir Wahba (Percussion)
Line Up 18.03.2024
20:30 Golnar Quintet
Golnar Shahyar (Vocals, Piano), Štěpán Flagar (Saxophone), Mahan Mirarab (Guitar), Chris Jennings (Bass), Amir Wahba (Percussion)
March 17 and 18, 2024
Jazz Club Moods
Inner Unity Ensemble & Sakina Teyna
Golnar Quintet
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Inner Unity Ensemble & Sakina Teyna
Defying the colonialist term «World Music», the Inner Unity Ensemble connects musicians of the diaspora with a very diverse set of backgrounds to (re)create music across cultural, regional, and genre borders. Their music is defined by modal and microtonal concepts found in Iranian Radif or Arabic and Turkish Maqams blended with various harmonic concepts in European classic music or jazz. Welcoming rhythmic accents and melodic harmonies as rich as their very own diverse heritage, the band features musicians from Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey, the Kurdish regions, and Italy. For the first time and perfectly fitting to the Nowruz festival, the Inner Unity Ensemble will also welcome Sakina Teyna, a Kurdish-Alevi singer from Varto in Turkey.
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Keynote:
Music of Resilience: Women's Singing in Iran, Afghanistan and Kurdistan
Yalda Yazdani is an ethnomusicologist, curator, and filmmaker. She was born in Iran. A Ph.D. student at the University of Siegen in Germany, Yalda received a full scholarship from the House of Young Talents Academy, won the DAAD award (German Academic Exchange Service), and has been conducting fieldwork research about female vocal songs and music in different regions of Iran. For more than 8 years, Yalda has been organizing intercultural projects, documentaries, music workshops, and concerts across Iran and Europe, thereby creating bridges between European and SWANA musicians and artists. In 2017 and 2018, she founded and curated the "Female Voices of Iran" festival in collaboration with the Contemporary Opera Berlin. The festival continued with later editions covering "Female Voices of Afghanistan and Kurdistan". She is currently working on various documentary productions focusing on music and its potential to cross cultural borders.
Monday, March 18, 2024
Golnar Quintet
Born and raised in Tehran, the Iranian-Canadian singer and multi-instrumentalist Golnar Shahyar understands music as a political act. Drawing equally from the traditions of Southwest Asian, North African, and contemporary music of Europe and America, she creates an extraordinary mixture of languages and styles. She dedicated her last tour to the slogan Woman* Life Freedom in the light of the ongoing revolution in Iran. With her current song 'Tell my mother she has no daughter anymore' she touched thousands of Iranians at home and abroad.
Sakina Teyna
Sakina was born into a Kurdish Alevite family in the small town of Varto in Turkey. As a teenager, she started singing with Turkish choirs and bands, but it wasn’t until she entered university that she became acquainted with Kurdish musical traditions and set out to defy cultural assimilation. In 1991, she joined the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre in Istanbul, a proponent of Kurdish culture, as a vocalist. Like many other Kurdish musicians, she was forced to literally go underground to practice her music and soon she had to choose political activism over art.
It wasn’t until Sakina arrived in Austria as a political refugee in 2006 that she took to singing as a full-time pursuit again.
Sakina joined forces with pianist Nazê Îşxan and violinist Nurê Dilovanî to form the all-female TRIO MARA, drawing on traditional Kurdish songs mainly sung by and passed on by women, enrichening the material with Western classical and contemporary approaches.
In 2013, the trio released their first album DERI / BEHIND THE DOORS, recorded live at the Rudolf Ötker Hall in Bielefeld. This earned the women trio wider acknowledgement. Publicly commissioned, trio mara toured many venues in the region.
Later, Sakina worked with the ANADOLU QUARTETT, touring Austria and Germany. Their first tour is successfully documented in the form of the live album KÖPRÜ/THE BRIDGE (Ahenk Müzik). This recording reached a large audience and garnered the group critical recognition.
Samin Ghorbani
Samin Ghorbani is a singer from Tehran trained in classical Iranian music.
Predominantly singing in Azeri, a language spoken in the north of Iran, Samin has been relentlessly collaborating with numerous musicians over the past 15 years, among others Nastar, Mojan, Sayesar, Nariman,Ronak or Raf.
Her powerful voice and artistic expression took her to concert and festival stages in Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan,Georgia, Germany, and Turkey.
Shabnam Pervaresh
Shabnam Parvaresh is a clarinetist, artist, and curator from Tehran, Iran. A student of fine arts and the clarinet, she left Tehran for Osnabrück to continue her studies in jazz clarinet at the Osnabrück Insitute of Music. In her music, she explores new blends of Persian music, electronic tunes, improvisation, and jazz to create a new musical aesthetic on the clarinet.
Sharing the stage with Sebastian Gramss, Angelika Niescier, Achim Kaufmann, Jan Klare, and Grammy Award Winner Kinan Azmeh, she later formed the She Sheen Trio and released the Gozar album on the Bethold Records label.
Beyond music, she paints and curates the concert series Klangfester in der hase29 for improvised music in Osnabrück.
Valentina Bellanova
Valentina Bellanova was born in Florence, Italy, and studied musicology and the recorder both in Italy and Germany. Valentina took a great interest in classical Turkish and Arabic music, studying their respective aesthethics and theories. She learned to play the Ney with Ross Daly, Ömer Erdogdular, and Kudsi Ergüner.
She plays both the Turkish and the Arabic Ney, performs on numerous stages (among others the National Theater Thuriniga, the Philharmonie Berlin, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, or Elbphilharmonie Hamburg) both solo and together with ensembles, such as the Husam Al Ali Ensemble, Almar'a: the Arab and Mediterranean Women Orchestra, Concerto Foscari (international Ensemble for early music), Ensemble Pera, Farmagia, Syriab Ensemble, Dj Sara Dziri, or Babylon Orchestra.
She´s the first European woman performing the „Istanbul Sinfonie“ by Fazil Say, for example in Staatstheater Braunschweig, in Scharoun Theater Wolfsburg, with the Bergischen Symphonikern in Solingen/Remscheid and the Niederrheinischen Symphonikern in Mönchengladbach.
Recentely she's been developing her personal music performance, called "Wind & Drums“. In this program, the diverse possibilities of the flutes, the neys and other wind instruments (such as duduk, hulusi, whistles, bagpipes and many others) are unfolded in connection with loops, effect pedals and percussion.
Her debut Solo album "Eremos", released in December 2021, embodies her various musical and cultural backgrounds and experiences, including early western and modal music, experimentation and tradition, medieval music, radical improvisation, maqamat and deep investigation of their respective languages.
Mahan Mirarab
Mahan Mirarab is a musician and composer from Tehran, currently living in Vienna.
Mahan’s authentic and honest language on his double-necked guitar combines European elements of chamber music combined with contemporary forms of jazz, opening a new interpretation of Iranian classical music.
He represents a generation of young migrant musicians in Europe who are changing the sound borders in the music industry and are pushing for more diversity with respect to quality, dialogue, and creativity. His aim is to introduce a new narrative through music in regard to middle eastern cultures and jazz and in doing so he has succeeded to create his complex yet accessible style.
His approach to composition and arrangement introduces a unique blend of rhythms and harmonies that showcases his rich musical vocabulary as well as his in-depth knowledge of many different styles. As a result, his compositions brilliantly avoid clichés and expand the understanding of how each style can be interpreted. Mahan’s compositions, arrangements, and performances find their way into numerous jazz, experimental, ecoustic, electronic, folk, and traditional projects as well as in films, theatre, and dance productions.
Amir Wahba
Amir Wahba is an Austrian percussionist with Egyptian roots. Having studied classical percussion for many years, he dedicated himself to the diversity of percussion instruments and styles of different cultures. Graduating from the renowned University Codards in Rotterdam, he returned to Vienna to continue his studies in drums/percussion at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
Amir’s understanding of music is driven by blends of jazz with Brazilian, Cuban, and North African music and percussion elements. His passion for groove, improvisation and the constant search for new timbres make him a versatile and sought-after percussionist and drummer. He is also employed at the Music School of the City of Vienna.
Chris Jennings
Based in Paris France since 2002, Canadian bassist Chris Jennings has established himself as double bassist with the Dhafer Youssef Quartet with Tigran Hamasyan and Mark Guiliana, with guitarist Nguyên Lê in his “Streams” Quartet, “Fire & Water Trio” and other formations including Rita Marcotulli, Danny Gottlieb, Roberto Gato, Rick Margitza, Karim Ziad, Bojan Z, the Thomas Enhco piano trio as well as with renowned Turkish nay master Kudsi Erguner and renowned Kurdish singer Aynur Dogan. He is bassist in pianist Joachim Küh’s New Trio with Eric Schafer with the ACT Music record label, the Gregory Privat Trio, the Titi Robin “Nargis Trio,” the Céline Bonacina quartet with pianist Gwilym Simcock and the renowned ‘El Gusto’ Algerian traditional chaabi orchestra to name a few.
An international performer having performed worldwide to all corners of the globe with jazz and world music projects, he is composer, leader, arranger and teacher, playing a wide variety of musical genres and styles on both upright and electric basses. Mr. Jennings projects as a sideman have included the Jacek Kochan/Dave Liebman Quartet, the Lee Konitz/Giovanni Ceccarelli Quartet, with Rick Margitza, Paul McCandless, Seamus Blake, Aaron Parks, Enrico Rava, Gary Husband, Benjamin Koppel, Marilyn Mazur, Kenny Werner, John Hadfield, Ari Hoenig, Eivind Aarset, Ziv Ravitz, Marko Crncec, Yaron Herman, Mark Shim, John Hadfield, Ludwig Afonso, Rudy Royston, Ferenc Nemeth, Omri Mor, Terumasa Hino, Kiyohiko Semba, Hüsnu Senlendirici, Ingrid Jensen, Valgeir Sigurosson (Bjork), Adrean Farrugia, Mike Murley, Dave Restivo, Phil Dwyer, Andy Milne, Marçin Wasilewski, Satoshi Takeishi, Nelson Veras, Airelle Besson to name a few.
After 7 extremely varied albums released under his own name, his last release with the CHRIS JENNINGS “DRUM’N KOTO,” (disc of the month Jazz Magazine, disc of the week FIP Radio France) features Nguyên Lê and Kudsi Ergüner as special guests. With a new album in progress with his latest CHRIS JENNINGS PIANO QUARTET +. Past releases include his self-titled CHRIS JENNINGS QUARTET CD featuring French musicians Manu Codjia (el. gtr), Pierre Perchaud (ac. gtr), Patrick Goraguer (drums), and leading a trio with renowned American drummer Leon Parker for years. Mr. Jennings has always continued his longstanding “JENNINGS / PERCHAUD” duo with acoustic guitar, a “SOLO DOUBLE BASS” project evolve for over a decade now, as well as the “CHRIS JENNINGS STRING QUINTET” featuring musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra. His 8th album of his latest Chris Jennings Piano Quartet + features Patrick Goraguer, Kalle Karim, Eric Schaefer and Hayden Chisholm.
Since 1996, Mr. Jennings completed numerous self-study/project residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts Canada, a Bachelors (B.A.) in Jazz Performance from the University of Toronto, Canada (2000), and a Masters (M.A.) in Music from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, Holland (2004). Teaching extensively at the Didier Lockwood Music School since 2005 and having taught at the Conservatory of Chelles France for 7 years, he is always actively giving master classes in conservatories and with the generous help of d’Addario Strings and David Gage pickups, alongside pursuing his energy in multicultural and original projects internationally.