Nowruz Festival
آبان Aban Ensemble & Collectif Medz Bazar
Saturday, March 18, 2023
Moods Jazzclub Zurich
Nowruz Festival
This is a first at the Moods Jazzclub. Nowruz, is the celebration of the arrival of spring and the new year according to ancient Persian calendars. Nowruz, meaning «new day», is an ancestral festivity marking the first day of spring and the renewal of nature. It includes rituals, ceremonies, and cultural events, as well as the enjoyment of a special meal with loved ones. New clothes are worn, visits are made to family and friends, and gifts, especially for children, are exchanged.
Celebrated for over 3,000 years in the Balkans, the Black Sea Basin, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and other regions, it promotes values of peace and solidarity between generations and within families as well as reconciliation.
For this reason, we have invited two different bands, a Persian female collective from Germany called آبان Aban Ensemble and Collectif Medz Bazar.
آبان Aban Ensemble: Mitra Behpoori (Tar, Oud, Vocals), Sara Hasti (Kamancheh, Vocals) und Nora Thiele (Perkussion, Daf, Rahmentrommel und Tombak)
Collectif Medz Bazar: Ezgi Sevgi Can (clarinet, saxophone, vocals), Shushan Kerovpyan (double bass, baglamadaki, vocals), Vahan Kerovpyan (percussion, keyboards, accordion, kalimba, vocals), Elâ Nuroğlu (percussion, saz, baglamadaki, vocals), Marius Pibarot (violin, double bass, percussion, vocals)
Saturday, March 18, 2023
Moods Jazzclub Zurich
Double concert
آبان Aban Ensemble
Collectif Medz Bazar
Leila Moon (afterparty)
آبان Aban Ensemble
آبان Aban Ensemble is a Persian female collective from Germany consisting of Mitra Behpoori, Sara Hasti, and Nora Thiele. The musicians will play pieces from the traditional Dastgah repertoire of Persian music and add their own compositions and improvisations.
Mitra Behpoori
Mitra Behpoori, Iranian tar and oud player, composer, doctoral candidate and research associate at the UNESCO Chair for Transcultural Music Studies (Weimar/Jena). She is a member of the Expert Committee for Intangible Cultural Heritage of the German UNESCO Commission. Since the beginning of her work at the HfM Weimar, she has been a project coordinator in AMRC "Afghanistan Research Center" in Germany, conceiving and moderating concert formats with musicians of Afghanistan's traditional and folk music.
Mitra continued her musical career in Germany in 2014 first with Duo Delgosha in various formats and genres from traditional Persian music to interdisciplinary/artistic projects, contemporary/electroacoustic music, and film music. Her passion for communicating music from her homeland led her and composer/sound engineer Max-Lukas Hundelshausen to become prize winners at the Detmold University of Music's Music Communication Competition in 2018 for the German-Persian show act «Tare Man - Meine Tar».
She has worked intensively on the material and immaterial aspects of her instrument (Tar). She published two essays on the topic in German (2018 & 2022) and also spoke and performed as a duo (Tar and World Percussion) in the symposium «Sketches of Iran», which took place as part of the Rudolstadt Festival 2019.
Sara Hasti
Sara Hasti, born in Iran, has been playing Kamancheh since she was 11 years old and studied Iranian music (B.A.) and ethnomusicology (M.A.) at the Art University of Tehran. Currently, she is studying applied musicology and music education at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
As an accomplished Kamancheh player, she has participated in numerous concerts and recordings. She Performed Kamancheh for music albums including «The Spirit Afar», «From the Heart & the Soul», or «In the Blaze of Songs.»
Nora Thiele
Nora Thiele is a master of frame drums and one of the leading percussionists in Europe. Her play stands for a highly sensitive unique sound and creative virtuosity in the field of World Percussion. In different formations between early music, Middle Eastern styles, jazz, improvisation, and contemporary music, she builds bridges between cultures, genres, and eras. With more than 1,000 concerts, she toured as a soloist, guest artists, and with her own bands through Europe, the Middle East, and China.
Nora Thiele studied ethnic percussion, drum set, and the piano at the music conservatory in Leipzig. She was raised in an artist family and composes music for her own projects. Since 2013 she is the Artistic Director of the Playgroundfestival Weimar.
Internationally, Nora Thiele is highly regarded for her precise and sensitive pedagogy and teaches courses at festivals and conservatories regularly. With more than 20 years of experience, she has developed her own rhythm method – GLOBAL RHYTHM FLOW. Respecting traditions, she derives innovative concepts and facilitates modern creativity.
Nora Thiele is thrilled by cooperations with other art forms such as theater, dance, art, film, and literature. She is convinced that borders are imaginary and that there is nothing better than music to make it possible to experience how much everything in the world is connected to each other – people, religions, identities, continents, cultures, and eras.
Collectif Medz Bazar
Each musician in this cross-cultural quintet is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Their message is one of emancipation and fraternity, their music is imbued with folk traditions, old and new. Singing in their mother tongues (Turkish, Armenian, English and French), they tell the story of an inner home, accustomed to exile, cultural blending, and renewal. Their 4th album, Insanistan, will take you from the mountains of the Lost Land to a place where languages, thoughts, and dreams can live together, retracing the road to hope, courage and the unknown.
Created in Paris in 2012, Collectif Medz Bazar has traveled extensively through Europe and performs regularly in North America and in the Middle East. Fervent lovers of gatherings and exchange, at ease with all audiences, Medz Bazar's musicians perform with the same enthusiasm in major cities like New York, Diyaberkir, Montreal, Yerevan, and Berlin, as in remote villages reaching from the Cévennes mountains in France to the Munzur valley in Anatolia.
Leila Moon
DJ Leila Moon is a songwriter, producer, and DJ specialising in funk, disco, raï, Gnawa, afrobeat, r’n’b, mahraganat, electronic, and house. Growing up in multicultural Basel, she was raised by an Algerian mother and a Moroccan father, watching anime and Bollywood on TV, listening to raï music, Arab pop, French chansons, American folk, and jazz.
Working on her very own music by songwriting, producing, and passionately sharing it with others, she went on a personal journey that traced her back to her roots, shaped, and strengthened her identity. Leila's collective influences and intercultural experiences culminate in her energetic and eclectic live set performances. For the Nowruz festival, she is well prepared to play her favorite gems with explosive dancefloor energy.
Tickets available now
starting from CHF 24