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Episode Transcript<\/p>\n
Olivia Allen-Price: It\u2019s a Saturday night in San Francisco and a tiny performance space called Red Poppy Art House is packed with people.\u00a0 They\u2019re here to listen to\u00a0 a unique wooden reed instrument called the duduk that has cultural ties to Armenia.<\/p>\n
Ethereal music starts<\/p>\n
Olivia Allen-Price: And even if you don\u2019t recognize the name duduk there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve heard it before \u2014 in the soundtracks to some major Hollywood movies \u2013 like The Last Temptation of Chris, Dune and Gladiator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ethereal music plays<\/p>\n
Olivia Allen-Price: It\u2019s now a staple for Hollywood composers<\/p>\n
The duduk\u2019s sound is haunting, and almost otherworldly\u2026it transports you.<\/p>\n
Khatchadour Khatchadourian: When it hits you, it hits you. It takes you to the place it wants to go<\/p>\n
Olivia Allen-Price: That\u2019s Khatchadour Khatchadourian, the duduk musician and vocalist who performed at the Red Poppy.<\/p>\n
Sounds of Khatchadourian playing duduk music<\/p>\n
Olivia Allen-Price: He\u2019s one of the few in the Bay Area who plays the instrument. His followers call him \u201cthe Duduk Whisperer<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n He uses it to push the boundaries of traditional Armenian music. And, as our producer Elize Manoukian learned along the way, he\u2019s preserving cultural identity through sound.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: The duduk is said to be the world\u2019s oldest double reed instrument.\u00a0<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t make it easy to play.<\/p>\n Squeaking sounds<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: When I play it, I sound like a dying goose. But in Khatchadour Khatchadourian\u2019s hands, the instrument comes to life.<\/p>\n Expert duduk music<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: when you know that something effortlessly flows through you, that\u2019s meant for you. With the double-reed nature, the physical nature of this fantastically torturous instrument, yet utterly beautiful instrument, there is a lot of grappling. It\u2019s a very physical instrument.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Khatchadour, who I call Khatch, and I are sitting in his home studio in Santa Rosa, and he\u2019s explaining the origins of his beloved duduk.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Traditionally, the duduk is the pairing of an apricot wood, the more aged the better, the tone of the instrument, paired with a double reed bamboo, which is pliant and soft.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: No longer than your forearm, and with only one single octave, the duduk gives off a powerfully tragic, almost melodramatic sound<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: The aged nature of the wood adds a little dark tone that I haven\u2019t found elsewhere. The soul of the instrument is full of longing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Many Armenians understand this longing. especially those with family members who survived the 1915 Armenian genocide. Khatch\u2019s family fled eastern Turkey along with more than a million others.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Armenians, the duduk\u2019s mournful melodies are stories told by multiple generations about\u00a0 the warmth, the joy, and the tragedy of their homeland.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Armenians as people have been around for several thousand years, we\u2019ve kept our traditions and cultures and language and expressions for a long time. I would say that the duduk speaks to that longevity, to that survival.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: The music Khatch plays with the duduk draws from a lot of new age, folk and world music influences. But some of his inspiration comes from a more unusual source: the music of the region\u2019s troubadours, known as ashugh in Armenian.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Ashugh people have traveled the region, the villages kind of carrying the wisdom traditions, the metaphor, And embedding that in the song.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Like this song Khatch is playing by an 18th century troubadour. These musicians were like the hippies of the Persian empire. They sang about love and yearning, and crossed cultures and borders to spread their poetry\u2014 borders which are strictly enforced now.<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: He wrote an Armenian, Azeri, Persian, Farsi, and Georgian. that is borderless state of artistry it contains all these worlds.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: In a sense, Khatch is the latest in a long line of these troubadours. This style is freeing to him as an artist he says \u2014 both as a musician and singer.<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: You\u2019re no longer classical, you don\u2019t care about what others think, how the voice soars. You just let the voice soar, you really become your being in that sense that you\u2019re meant to.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Khatchadour was born to an Armenian family in Beirut, which for years was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Before 1975, Beirut had around 200,000 Armenians, who had built new lives there after the Genocide.\u00a0<\/p>\n But by the time Khatch was born, the city had exploded into civil war.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: \u200aI have pretty dark memories, running to underground refuges, bunkers, or what have you.\u00a0<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: This is a familiar story for the people of Lebanon, who were caught up in senseless violence for 15 years. The war separated his family, with his father heading to the U.S., while Khatch, his mother and sister fled across the border to Aleppo, in Syria. Khatch didn\u2019t see his dad again for another 12 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n For much of his time in Aleppo, Khatch sang with his middle school\u2019s choir.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Sound of\u00a0 child singing<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: That\u2019s Khatch singing his first solo in 1997. The choir sang Armenian, Arabic and some English songs too. He said it was an important outlet for him as a kid.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: It was really the funnest thing ever, because we were so restricted between school and just the way life was.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: The choir was led by a man who Khatch called Maestro Abadjian.<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: I always remember torturing the maestro like he was such a kind, kind guy but I remember him having very little hair and his hair would just move on his hair a little bit and we would all be children and kind of like giggle.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Performing with this choir and learning from Maestro Abajian became the foundation of his love for music.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u200aKhatchadour Khatchadourian: I remember his green eyes. Such a beautiful person. Like he would carry an artistic torch in a place that probably needed it.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: When Khatch was 15, his family moved to Los Angeles, where his dad had been living for over a decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n The transition was rough. It was hard being a teenager in a new country, especially after living through so much turmoil.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: I did not do any music for about ten years.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: He went to UC Berkeley, hoping to find himself on his own, away from the nest. He almost became a political scientist, researching the Armenian community of Lebanon. But studying his own experience only brought him more darkness, and he was desperate for a creative outlet to channel it.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s when he found the duduk.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: I was suffering, and I was tremendously isolated, um, and to find kind of a meaning within myself, I was in a lot of pain, psychological pain, and the duduk spoke to that. It worked beautifully, I wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s cheaper than therapy [[laughs]].<\/p>\n Olivia Allen-Price: When we return, Khatch\u2019s duduk career takes off \u2013 and takes him around the world. Stay with us\u2026<\/p>\n Sponsor message<\/p>\n Olivia Allen-Price: When Khatch discovered the duduk in college, he had finally found an instrument that could express what he was feeling inside. His initial interest grew into a full fledged career.<\/p>\n Sound of duduk music<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian:Over the past ten years, Khatch has sung and performed the duduk all over the world. He\u2019s recorded five studio albums, all featuring the duduk and voice \u2014 including an album of Armenian lullabies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lullabies across cultures have been traditionally performed by women, and passed down through their voices.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Not that Armenian males don\u2019t sing to their sons and daughters, but I wanted to make kind of a public statement around it.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: So Khatch decided to record an album of Armenian lullabies and songs for children, which he released in 2019. He was the first person to do this in a male voice<\/p>\n lullaby plays<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Underneath all of that, I was also dealing with being raised without a father, saying, \u201cHow did that shape the masculine and the male that I am?\u201d And in what sense can I invite others, in this case, the masculine to be vulnerable, to be open, to be tender.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Because the pandemic hit right after the album release he didn\u2019t get many chances to perform it. As fate would have it, he performed that album for the first time at a children\u2019s festival in Turkey.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Flying Carpet Festival brings music and arts to kids displaced by conflicts like the Syrian civil war and others in the region<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: Singing Armenian to Kurdish, to Arab, to Turkish children was profound because I was a singing about childhood, about innocence, about those energies that in a sense, I hope, we all protect. And in the light of actually what\u2019s happened in Gaza, we failed to do. Just saying it as I see it, we failed to protect children. The most vulnerable, yet, most open of our humanity.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: A simple song for a child can be a sanctuary. Take this lullaby from Khatch\u2019s album:\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: When I perform it, I actually tear up as well, it moves a lot in me. It says, the sun is your father, the moon is your mother, the trees rock you. And, you know, it\u2019s elemental.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Khatch was moved by the story the lullaby told about the relationship between the singer and the land. But what he didn\u2019t know when he recorded this album, was that the meaning of that song would soon change for him.<\/p>\n The song comes from a village in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in the former Soviet Union and with a history dating back thousands of years. But just two years ago, conflict escalated between Armenia and Azerbaijan, neighboring countries who both claimed the region. In 2023, more than 120,000 Armenians fled\u00a0 their homes, carrying their belongings and their songs with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatch now holds onto this music, as a way to hold onto a piece of his people\u2019s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: The fact that you\u2019re singing it, you\u2019re carrying part of a tradition that has endured.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0Elize Manoukian: Music and culture are not fixed in stone, he says, nor can they be easily erased. These troubadour love songs and lullabies come back to life whenever they\u2019re heard or played.<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: And hopefully they remain with us as, as more people, more artists see the value of keeping alive these precious jewels.<\/p>\n Elize Manoukian: Khatch is now working on his 6th album, and has spent hundreds of hours composing and arranging original pieces out of these cultural relics.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the duduk\u2019s power doesn\u2019t just come from what it keeps alive from the past. For Khatch, it\u2019s a doorway to something greater than himself.<\/p>\n The duduk allows him to say what words often fail to capture.\u00a0<\/p>\n Studio recording of duduk\u00a0<\/p>\n Khatchadour Khatchadourian: I find myself in my own studio. It\u2019s a lot of darkness I\u2019m going through in a sad moment, that I just put my headphones, I start the practice of playing the instrument. And I feel my soul exalted, something is lifted. And then aww, like just as if I\u2019m among fields of stars or something transformative deep down happened. Yet I am in my studio. So I didn\u2019t go to another edge of the universe, so this instrument does that to you.<\/p>\n Olivia Allen-Price: Khatchadour Khatchadourian, the Duduk Whisperer. His story came to us from producer Elize Manoukian. The Bay Curious team is Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me Olivia Allen-Price.<\/p>\n Both Bay Curious and The California Report Magazine are made in San Francisco at KQED \u2013 your local public media station. Join thousands of your neighbors in supported us today at KQED.org\/donate<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.<\/p>\n I\u2019m Olivia Allen-Price. I\u2019ll see ya next time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This story first aired on The California Report Magazine. Be sure to check out their podcast for more stories from around the Golden State.
This episode was produced by Victoria Mauleon, Suzie Racho, Brendan Willard, Katherine Monahan, Srishti Prabha and Sasha Khokha.\u00a0<\/p>\n