PASSION

Saeid Shanbehzadeh comes out of the small hall in Hannover, Germany, where he’s going to play a mixture of southern Iran’s traditional music and jazz along with his band to lead us in. He looks exhausted; certainly not like a person who’s going to be on stage in less than two hours! He tells us that one member of his band, Habib, has been temporarily detained by the border police and just arrived in Hannover. Habib who just like Saeid comes from the city of Boushehr in southern Iran, hasn’t been able to sleep for 35 hours! Two hours later, the eyes of the hundred or so people, mostly Iranian expatriates living in this Lower Saxony city, are glued to the center stage and to Saeid who comes out as a totally different person, as a natural-born showman. It’s crystal clear that he loves the stage and so does the stage him! His passion and enthusiasm for the music of this remote part of Iran is contagious. The moment he begins playing his goat-skin bagpipe (Ney Anbaan), singing the folk songs of Booshehr, and dancing to the tune, swinging his hips, or pounding on his drums (Dammaam), or when he explains some points about the traditional tunes, people start shushing each other, so they would miss not a single note or word. -- Omid Nikfarjam