“Facet Fourteen”
From Post-Chromodal Out!
(Pi Recordings) 2012

I first encountered Hafez Modirzadeh’s musical world almost precisely a decade ago, on the (then) newly released Post-Chromodal Out!. The teetering upbeat to this composition – the album’s second – is exhilarating enough, but as soon as the first downbeat arrives, we are completely transported to new sonic spaces. Modirzadeh has long sought to provide musicians alternative possibilities to those provided by the equal-tempered scale, and much of his work has featured a piano – for the last couple of centuries, perhaps the ultimate equal-tempered beast – retuned to reflect the influence of Persian music. From this very first occasion on which it is struck, we can hear the new resonances the instrument has acquired in its new tuning: perhaps recalling gamelan sonorities at points. Not to suggest that the instrument plays itself, however, and Vijay Iyer is magnificent throughout the album. For all the research which informs Modirzadeh’s music, it never sounds self-consciously conceptual, as the brawling swing of this track amply evidences.

“La Angustia De Los Amantes”
From In Convergence Liberation
(Pi Recordings) 2014

We need to avoid lazy classifications such as Persian jazz, however, based on Modirzadeh’s Iranian-American heritage, or his longtime study with the master Persian musician Mahmoud Zoufonoun – this is a new soundworld certainly informed by aspects of Persian traditions, but not one attempting to transliterate them onto jazz instruments. Modirzadeh has also made a study of Turkish traditions, the music of the Gnawa and flamenco, as well as having a deep immersion in the African-American jazz tradition. Thus here, we have the poetry of Rumi, but rendered in Spanish, and with clear echoes of Andalusian traditions. Amir El-Saffar – who, in many meaningful ways across this and other records does indeed play Diz to Hafez’s Bird, or Cherry to his Coleman – makes a characteristically mesmerizing contribution. I also love Milli Bermejo’s dark-toned vocals here, which in some oblique way bring to mind those of Mossa Bildner on “Grief”, from the Henry Threadgill classic Song Out Of My Trees.

“Number That Moves”
From In Convergence Liberation
(Pi Recordings) 2014

From the same album comes “Number that Moves”. There are several remarkable things about this track. For one, I think the string writing is hugely creative. At times, it recalls Ornette Coleman’s still vastly underrated writing for strings – an impression heightened, perhaps, by the combination of quartet-plus-percussion, heard so magnificently both here and on Ornette’s Prime Time/Prime Design. Indeed, Ornette was for a number of years something of a mentor to Modirzadeh, and we can hear clear kinships in their approaches to melodic contour: inflections arrived at in Coleman’s case through the blues tradition, and in Modirzadeh’s through his investigation of microtonality in Persian music. Both also share a captivatingly vocal tone on the alto saxophone. A final observation on this track: it is based on an idea from the slow movement of the Op 81a piano sonata of Beethoven. Elsewhere, Modirzadeh has reworked the almost impossibly chromatic masterpiece which is the 25th variation of Bach’s Goldberg series – sometimes known as the “Black Pearl”, the name carried too by Modirzadeh’s rendering. Modirzadeh clearly loves this music, and I think that an important aspect of his output is generosity: he is looking not to trash equal temperament and the great works written which assume it (not getting here into fascinating though arcane debates as to what Bach’s “Well Tempered” temperament in fact was). Instead, he seeks to offer parallel ways of organising temperament, so that we don’t blindly follow the muscle/aural memory of the currently predominant modes of western music. Ornette wrote music in all languages, and Modirzadeh writes of chromodality: both seem to me to be talking about expanding possibilities, not rejecting them.

“Facet 35 Ode B’kongofon”
From Facets
(Pi Recordings) 2021

Of course there are many excellent reasons why a musician might send a typeset part instead of a handwritten one; but there is something wonderful about playing from a handwritten part when possible. The clarity of Hafez’s handwritten charts is evidence of his strength of musical purpose. At the top of “Facet 35”, the score reads “broken stride” and there is something brilliantly playful about how Craig Taborn stalks Modirzadeh through the changes on this track. Playfully broken stride, of course, can often be found in Thelonious Monk’s work, and it is telling that Monk’s “Pannonica” and “Ask Me Now” can also be heard on this album (listen, too, to “Facet 34 Defracted”). Monk famously sought out the seemingly impossible in between notes on the piano (as had Milt Jackson on the vibraphone). This track also showcases Modirzadeh’s remarkable technical control of the saxophone: he uses fingering and embouchure to realise his new modes, rather than any modifications to the instrument as such. The false fingerings (whereby alternative fingerings for the same basic pitch result in fact in subtle differences of tuning and colouration) on this track actually brought to mind another great exponent of the technique, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis: perhaps a distant reminder that as a younger man, Modirzadeh also crossed paths with the likes of Red Holloway and Sonny Stitt. The closing track on the album, by the way, is a wonderful Taborn solo miniature of this composition.

“Mount Harissa”
From Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra presents Ellington-Strayhorn’s Far East Suite
(Asian Improv) 1999

I include this because although something of a branch line to the main narrative of Modirzadeh’s music, it is fascinating to hear him in an ostensibly more straight-ahead jazz context (there is an album of his own where he plays some standard tunes, but I confess to not having heard it). Because of the relatively orthodox rhythm section, we can hear very clearly how the inflections of Modirzadeh’s saxophone push and pull in an intriguing and unusual way against the harmony. And yet: the performance is very much in the spirit of, say, a Paul Gonsalves. I think the interesting point is that Hafez obliquely reminds us that so many of the great players of the past also experimented with temperament (albeit usually in a less explicit way), through the careful, personalised sculpting of intonation which was simply one element of their personal sound (think Von Freeman or Jackie McLean, for instance). Finally, on the subject of Modirzadeh as sideman, we should acknowledge too his contributions to the projects of an unsung giant of creative music, Fred Ho.

“Facet 39 Mato Paha”
From Facets
(Pi Recordings) 2021

For all this talk of influences and concepts, I don’t want to detract from the actual sound of Hafez’s music, which can be extremely beautiful indeed. The tuning used on the Facets album gives the piano a special type of luminosity and, especially played quietly, it can have a quite magical effect – as mentioned above, sometimes recalling the gamelan and gong family of sounds. The score to “Facet 39” also bears the title “Prayer”, and to my ears, this piece and performance have about them something of the serenity of a Coltrane composition such as “After The Rain”. Tyshawn Sorey’s control of the quiet sounds of the instrument is stunning here, as is Kris Davis’s and Craig Taborn’s elsewhere on the album, which throughout is something of a masterclass in tone production (an arguably frequently neglected part of piano playing). The directness and simplicity with which Modirzadeh is able to express himself here strikes me as very rare indeed.

Alexander Hawkins and Hafez Modirzadeh perform together at Glasgow Counterflows on 2 April 2022.

Read The Wire's Invisible Jukebox interview with Hawkins in The Wire 397 via the digital archive.