Interview: Alim Qasimov, Mugam Maestro

With his sublime renditions of Azerbaijan's classical music, Alim Qasimov is one of the world's great performers. On the eve of the singer's appearance at the Barbican’s Transcender Weekend of spiritual trance music, where he is performing this Sunday, theartsdesk recalls a trip to the old Soviet state to drink vodka, play chess and find out about this extraordinary singer.

"FIZULI!" Alim Qasimov shouts the word and seems to have taken leave of his senses as he mimes a martial art move in the street. I'm already distracted by the startling sight of young Baku beauties in mini-skirts and bare midriffs on their evening passagiata around leafy Fountain Square (we are, after all, in a nominally Islamic country, just over the border from Iran). It turns out that we have run into Fizuli Moussayev, the world champion at karate. "Fizuli! Champion karate!" Qasimov does the introductions. "Mr Peter! Journalist!" He pauses. "Champion also!"

Azerbaijan has not had many champions of late. Gary Kasparov, whose chess school was down the road from my hotel, is one. But his mother is Armenian, and that makes him suspicious to Azeris, who have simmering territorial disputes with the Armenians. The Azeris haven't exactly been setting the world alight musically, but in Alim Qasimov they have a world-class singer.

He won the Unesco Music Award, a prize previously given to global heavyweight talents such as Ravi Shankar, György Ligeti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Yehudi Menuhin. Critics in Europe have been hyperventilating ("You are truly and deeply touched by a concert about as often as you fall in love," said the man from Stuttgarter Zeitung). In 2008, the musical magpie David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet recorded an album with him (watch a short film about the project on YouTube, below).



Qasimov's album, Love's Deep Ocean, on the respected German label Network, is a gloriously passionate, inventive and wonderful piece of work. I saw him at the increasingly influential Fes Festival of World Sacred Music a few years ago, when he stole the show.

Alim sings a classical genre called mugam, using traditional instruments such as the tar (a kind of lute) and kemencheh (a spiked fiddle), with assorted woodwind and percussion. Although related to Arabic and Persian music, it is idiosyncratically Azeri. Perhaps because mugam has been largely ignored by the west for the past 1,300 years, the Azeris seemed fascinated that a journalist had travelled to their capital, Baku, to investigate their national music. Having only achieved independence from Russia a decade ago, assertions of national identity are prized. When I asked about the fragile peace with Armenia, a jazz musician, Vagif Sadikhov, told me: "If the Armenians say they have invented mugam, then the hostilities will recommence."

To my bemusement, a press conference was announced on my first day there, and I found myself on Super TV, AZ TV and other local stations being grilled about my limited knowledge of Azeri music. My 15 minutes had their benefit, though, as carpetmakers and other artisans offered me rock-bottom prices for their wares. "Friend of our music! For you, very good price."

When I visited the farm where Qasimov grew up, a sheep was slaughtered in my honour before being disembowelled in front of me and turned into kebabs, which we washed down with vodka. An amusing game followed in which I was passed morsels and asked to guess which bit of the mutton it was. I met Qasimov's parents, short, sturdy, brimming with life and in their seventies. They told me that when Alim was born there were no cars, television or gramophone. The local radio played Russian and traditional Azeri music so their son, now 50, missed out on the Beatles and other Sixties pop.

Alim's father, Hamza, worked on one of the Soviet-style collective farms. They were never hungry, but the roof leaked and they couldn't afford enough clothes or musical instruments. Makeshift instruments were fashioned out of kitchen pots and pans, with telephone wires as strings. Hamza himself has a fair voice, and was using it with gusto after numerous vodka toasts to British-Azeri relations, assorted relatives, music, love, and humanity in general (with the possible exception of Armenians).

Alim's talent was evident early on, and when a teenager he would sing at weddings. He eloped with his girlfriend, now his charming wife Tamila, after her relatively rich parents objected, and took a series of jobs in oil plants and as a chauffeur. But at 21, Qasimov decided he didn't like getting up in the morning and was wasting his talent, so he enrolled with not one but three mugam teachers, which kept him busy from eight in the morning until late at night.

As a performer he experienced the repressive nature of the Soviet regime. In his late twenties, he was sent to Washington DC to take part in the Soviet Arts Festival. The KGB officer in charge of the delegation, there to stop defections, told Qasimov to say he came from Moscow. After all, the festival was supposed to be for the glory of the Soviet system. Also, the Russians had always been suspicious of the Azeris and their hot-blooded southern tendencies, especially when it came to music. It was difficult to control the more bohemian elements on the edges of the empire, so there was little they could do when Baku became a centre of jazz - which the Russians frowned on as bourgeois and decadent - in the Thirties.



Qasimov is, in a sense, part of that improvising tradition, playing with the accepted structures of mugam, and pushing it in new directions. More conservative mugam singers, who stick to the written notes, feel that Qasimov is breaking too many rules of the genre. While he says he has no plans for any electronic remixes (he is often compared to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who became globally famous partly through a Massive Attack remix of Musst Musst, which ended up as a Coca-Cola advert), he is making other experiments.

While I was there he was rehearsing an opera written by the Jewish composer Piris Eliyahu, which mixes different oriental styles. The story, Leyli Madjnun, is an eastern version of Romeo and Juliet. The lead roles are taken by Qasimov and his daughter Ferghana, who has inherited the Qasimov vocal genes and often performs with him. Seeing them perform love songs for each other was very tender, albeit with distinct Freudian overtones.

His justification for straying from the straight and narrow of mugam is that he is responding to and reinventing the spirit rather than the letter of the genre. At his charming but modest flat in downtown Baku, he dug out a tape of a mugam singer, Mashadi Fazzaliyev, recorded nearly a century ago. The sheer passion of the music broke through the veils of time and poor recording quality. Qasimov said one day he hoped to emulate the power of the music we heard. In a sense, the Soviet occupation caused a break in a tradition that he is intuitively reconnected to. Qasimov, you feel, is destined to become one of the world's great singers.

We visited his manager’s dacha outside Baku, with peacocks, swimming pool and stables. I challenged Qasimov’s manager to chess, and lost. While there we watched a video of a glitzy Hollywood charity do, featuring assorted singers. Qasimov looked impassively at the parade of divas - Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey. But then Aretha Franklin came on. His face lit up. Later, he asked me whether on his visit to London he could get to see someone like Aretha, who was a "real singer".

The most unforgettable moment was to come. We drove out to a natural Azeri wonder - a fire that has burnt for thousands of years through natural gas, the element that is propelling the current economic surge. A hundred years ago, Azerbaijan produced the majority of the world's oil. Now the boom, albeit faltering, is back on, and is the reason the country does not have the desperation of many of the other ex-Soviet satellites. The eternal flames danced on a hill, an amazing sight. One could understand how the fire-worshipping religion of Zoroastrianism had its origin in Azerbaijan. The type of Islam around these parts always had pagan elements. Qasimov moved around the flames and began to sing, songs of love gone wrong, songs to nature and the divinity, a voice at once masculine and feminine, disturbing and inspiring with its intensity.

• Book tickets for the Barbican's Transcender Weekend here.
• Find Alim Qasimov on Amazon