Regent Hall, tucked away right by Oxford Circus, is said to be a promising venue for world music. Indeed, last Friday, straight after Pouyan Biglar’s fine performance at the British Museum Silk Roads event, I hurried off there to hear more art music of Iran, with Hossein Alizadeh and the Hamavayan Ensemble (samples on YouTube e.g. here and here).

The current octet is led by Alizadeh on tar, with Houshmand Ebadi (ney), Hossein’s son Saba Alizadeh (kamancheh), Parisa Pooladian (robab), Ali Boustan (setar), and Behnam Samani (percussion). After the concert at SOAS last month I was glad of another chance to hear the vocals of Mehdi Emami, dovetailing with female singer Zahre Gholipour.

Master musicians have long been subtly adapting the radifs and dastgahs of traditional Persian muqam. Hossein Alizadeh (b.1950) is a prominent star in this lineage, reaching out to wider audiences over several decades. Modern tastes for a rather larger ensemble leads to more polished arrangements; Call Me Old-Fashioned, but I prefer the intimacy of a smaller group.

Still, the musicians’ demeanour on stage is entirely without ostentation, and their programme for the current tour mostly eschews the more popular repertoire heard on some of their CDs. Such is Alizadeh’s reputation that the largely Iranian audience listened with reverence through all the long free-tempo sections—far from easy listening, and surely remote from their daily tastes in rock or rap, whether in Tehran or London. Not all migrant communities elsewhere in the world show such devotion to their own traditional music, but Iranians in exile doubtless feel a need for emblems of Persian culture. In a week when two harrowing new BBC documentaries on Iran became available, it is hard for outsiders like me to connect the cachet of this refined tradition with changing currents in modern society and the ongoing unrest.

For further attempts at educating myself, see under West/Central Asia: a roundup.

With thanks to Saeid Kordmafi.