All over Los Angeles, Zachary Asdourian hunted for the music of an Iran that could have been.<\/p>\n
The co-founder of the L.A. record label Discotchari scoured for dust-caked Persian pop records at Jordan Market in Woodland Hills; scanned the fliers for shows at Cabaret Tehran in Encino, and combed shops in Glendale looking for Farsi-language tapes cut in L.A. studios in the \u201870s and \u201880s.<\/p>\n
Most of the songs he and his label partner, Ana\u00efs Gyulbudaghyan, sought were long-forgotten dance tracks, culturally-specific twists to the era\u2019s disco boom. They\u2019re poignant reminders of a time in L.A.\u2019s Westwood \u201cTehrangeles\u201d neighborhood when, in the years just after the 1979 Iranian revolution, immigrants here made music while their homeland roiled with ascendant theocracy.<\/p>\n
Discotchari\u2019s new crate-digger compilation \u201cTehrangles Vice\u201d collects some of the best of them. Its 12 tracks were made in L.A. and circulated within the Iranian diaspora, then smuggled back into Iran on dubbed tapes and satellite broadcasts. They\u2019re largely lost to time here, but fondly recalled there as bombastic dispatches from a cosmopolitan yet heartbroken immigrant community in L.A. <\/p>\n
The music has lessons for artists watching the revanchist conservatism creeping over the United States today.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese songs were supposed to represent the next step in Iranian music,\u201d Asdourian said. \u201cThese artists were geniuses at shaking up what was happening in the \u201880s and \u201890s to produce an Iranian version of it. This music was meant to be heard at a party while dancing and drinking in Tehrangeles, but it also provided solace during the Islamic revolution, the Iraq war and the Iran-Contra affair. For citizens of Iran, this was giving hope as bombs were literally falling.\u201d<\/p>\n
The music scene this compilation documents came after a period of more stable relationships between the U.S. and Iran. Thousands of Iranian students immigrated to L.A. in the \u201860s and \u201870s and stayed, some opening restaurants and nightclubs in Westwood, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley where they could hear Iranian music.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of these clubs in L.A. pre-dated the revolution. Artists like Googoosh were already coming in from Iran to perform. Many musicians who were in U.S. when the revolution happened thought they were having a little sojourn and intended to go back someday,\u201d said Farzaneh Hemmasi, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto who wrote the book \u201cTehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California\u2019s Iranian Pop Music\u201d and contributed the liner notes for \u201cTehrangeles Vice.\u201d <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An insert from a cassette tape that Farokh \u201cElton\u201d Ahi previously worked on.<\/p>\n
(Emil Ravelo \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cBut after the 1979 revolution, musicians in Los Angeles were told by family in Iran not to go back, that they were rounding up artists, that people associated with westernization and immorality will be targeted,\u201d Hemmasi said. \u201cSo they stayed and worked.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of them was Farokh \u201cElton\u201d Ahi, who came to L.A. at 17 to study architecture at USC, but left that career to produce for Casablanca Records, the premier disco label of the era. He DJ\u2019ed at Studio 54 in NYC and elite nightclubs in L.A., and produced for the likes of Donna Summer and Elton John at his Hollywood studio, Rusk (Ahi got his nickname from an interviewer who called him \u201cElton Joon,\u201d a Farsi-language term of endearment).<\/p>\n
Even in the decadent disco era, he felt an obligation to champion Iranian music in L.A.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted kids to enjoy the link between our culture and western culture,\u201d Ahi said. \u201cBut we were also trying to bring what was happening in Iran to people\u2019s attention with our music, which was one reason I could never go back there. Kids who had come from Iran loved Prince and Michael Jackson and were becoming super American, so we had to do something to keep them engaged in our music as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the 1979 hostage crisis, Anglo nightclubs and radio in L.A. were not keen on Persian pop music, to say the least. Ahi led a double life as an Americanized disco producer, while also writing for his immigrant community.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose days, because of the hostage crisis, it wasn\u2019t fun and games having Iranian music in the club. People were against Iranians and it wasn\u2019t a happy time,\u201d Ahi said. \u201cBut we were making quality music with limited resources. There were not many musicians here who could play Iranian instruments, so I had to learn a bunch of them. I felt a duty to keep our music alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two \u201880s-era tracks he produced, Susan Roshan\u2019s \u201cNazanin\u201d and Leila Forouhar\u2019s \u201cHamsafar,\u201d appear on \u201cTehrangeles Vice,\u201d which brims with the only-in-L.A. cultural collusion of mournful Persian melodies and lyrics about exile, paired with new wave grit and \u201880s synth-disco pulses. Aldoush\u2019s \u201cVay Az in Del\u201d has sample-blasted horns right out of the \u201880s TV show that gives the compilation its name. There\u2019s even a strong Latin percussive element on tracks like Shahram Shabpareh and Shohreh Solati\u2019s \u201cGhesmat,\u201d which showed how Iranian artists dipped into the global crossroads of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Even if this music didn\u2019t make an impact on the charts here, it found its way back to post-revolution Iran clandestinely, on tapes and music video satellite broadcasts. Club-friendly pop music made in L.A. took on new potency abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe official culture in Iran in the \u201880s was very sorrowful because of the war, and Shiite Islam was very oriented towards mourning. Ramadan was a sad time with no music,\u201d Hemmasi said. \u201cBut in L.A., you\u2019ve got Iranians dancing and singing, which was not happening within the country where people needed to sing and dance even more. This music had a contraband quality that was underground in Iran itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of Iranian artists wouldn\u2019t like this comparison, but this music was really punk at its core,\u201d Asdourian agreed. \u201cYou\u2019d have people standing on street corners in trench coats selling cassettes. People had illegal satellite hookups to hear news and ideology from the diaspora that contradicted what they were being fed. This music was a means to restore values they felt were lost in the revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Top to bottom, Farokh \u201cElton\u201d Ahi with record label Discotchari founders Zachary Asdourian and Anais Gyulbudaghyan in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Emil Ravelo \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
As contemporary Angelenos rallying for this era of Iranian music, Asdourian and Gyulbudaghyan of Discotchari will stop at nothing to ship murkily-sourced tapes from Iran, western Asia and the Caucasus for their label. \u201cIn January, we went to Armenia and met a guy who knew a guy at a restaurant in Yerevan who had someone drive tapes in from Tabriz in Iran,\u201d Asdourian said. \u201cThey sent us GPS coordinates to pick them up, and we ended up in this abandoned former Soviet manufacturing district getting chased by a guard dog. But he had 30 cassettes, all still sealed in their boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet some of the acts on \u201cTehrangeles Vice\u201d are still active, living and working in California. After a long hiatus, Roshan recently released new music inspired by Iran\u2019s Woman, Life, Freedom Movement, and Ahi is a sound engineer and mixer for film (he worked on \u201cLast of the Mohicans,\u201d which won an Oscar for sound mixing). He recently contributed to a remix of Ed Sheeran\u2019s \u201cAzizam,\u201d which sprinkles Farsi phrasing into upbeat pop and became a global hit. \u201cEd reached out and asked me to write some melodies that matched Googoosh\u2019s singing to make it more international, we put our minds together and I\u2019m so proud of it,\u201d Ahi said.<\/p>\n
As the United States now reckons with its own powerful right-wing religious movement in government, one eager to clamp down on cultural dissent, \u201cTehrangeles Vice\u201d has lessons for musicians in the wake of a backlash. The compilation is both a specific document of a proud music culture clamping down at home and flowering abroad. But it\u2019s also a reminder that, whether made in exile or played under attack, art is a well of possibility for imagining another life.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if the geographical location isn\u2019t same, for Iranians, L.A. represents this exiled piece of history, an Iran that could have been,\u201d Hemmasi said. \u201cIt\u2019s a message in a bottle from another time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All over Los Angeles, Zachary Asdourian hunted for the music of an Iran that could have been. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[19386,19380,12837,19388,19383,19378,19381,19382,19379,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,19384,330,592,19387,19385],"class_list":{"0":"post-25269","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-80-iran","9":"tag-ahi","10":"tag-artist","11":"tag-compilation-document","12":"tag-farsi-language-tape","13":"tag-iran","14":"tag-iranian-music","15":"tag-iranian-revolution","16":"tag-l-a-studio","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-la-headlines","19":"tag-la-news","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","22":"tag-los-angeles-news","23":"tag-los-angeles-times","24":"tag-many-musician","25":"tag-music","26":"tag-people","27":"tag-tehrangeles-vice","28":"tag-zachary-asdourian"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}