Cyminology
Berlin-based group, Cyminology, founded by Cymin Samawatie in 2002, may be the only Western jazz ensemble performing ballads with lyrics in Farsi (Persian). Her quartet with Indian drummer Ketan Bhatti, French-born pianist Benedikt Jahnel and German bassist Ralf Schwarz performs a unique brand of intercultural chamber jazz – by turns poetic, sensual, melancholic, dynamic and pulsating – that takes its musical inspiration from the sounds and inflections of the Farsi language.
Cymin Samawatie is both the group’s charismatic leader and writer of most of the material. Born to Iranian parents in Germany, she was raised bilingually and bi-culturally. She studied classical music in Hannover, focusing on percussion and piano, as well as jazz voice and composition in Berlin.
Cymin writes texts in Farsi (Persian) and sets them to her own music, often developed through improvising. [...]
Berlin-based group, Cyminology, founded by Cymin Samawatie in 2002, may be the only Western jazz ensemble performing ballads with lyrics in Farsi (Persian). Her quartet with Indian drummer Ketan Bhatti, French-born pianist Benedikt Jahnel and German bassist Ralf Schwarz performs a unique brand of intercultural chamber jazz – by turns poetic, sensual, melancholic, dynamic and pulsating – that takes its musical inspiration from the sounds and inflections of the Farsi language.
Cymin Samawatie is both the group’s charismatic leader and writer of most of the material. Born to Iranian parents in Germany, she was raised bilingually and bi-culturally. She studied classical music in Hannover, focusing on percussion and piano, as well as jazz voice and composition in Berlin.
Cymin writes texts in Farsi (Persian) and sets them to her own music, often developed through improvising. She says: “Our music is somewhere in between jazz, world music and classical music and between cultures, Occident and Orient. It is never simply one thing or the other, but somehow all and none of them at once."
The group’s widely acclaimed 2009 ECM debut, As Ney, included classic Persian verse by Rumi as well as 20th-century Iranian poetry. Jazz Journal praised “this (mostly) gently affecting excursion into Sufi-touched but definitely contemporary, cross-cultural chamber jazz”.
On the group’s third album, Phoenix, they were joined, for the first time on a recording project by Berlin Philharmonic violist Martin Stegner, who has been a frequent collaborator with Cyminology since 2011. The viola, the string instrument closest to the human voice, becomes a kind of second singer here, extending the sense of East/West dialogue in the music. This album was dedicated to the memory of Forough Farrokhzaad (1935-1967), the outspoken Iranian modernist poet and film director.
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