My friends and I are slowly re-surfacing after a week long celebration of life, friendships, music, and love for Iran and Iranian.com. We have so much to show you and tell you! Give me a couple of days to put together the pictures taken by various photographers and tell you the story I want to tell you about last week! In the meantime, I think I should write to quickly say what a great night it was!
No matter how much I knew about Saturday night’s artists, no matter how many YouTube clips I had watched and CD tracks I had listened to, nothing had prepared me for how delighted I was with Saturday night’s performances! And I wasn’t alone! Hundreds of other people shared the same sentiments with me!
Our night got started with the wonderful music of Parisa Vaaleh and her fabulous fellow musicians who played beautiful music, and did such a good job on the stage, impressing everyone with their camaraderie, mastery of their music, and the excitement that kept on building up all night long. Beautiful and talented Parisa Vaaleh was joined by Kamran Thunder on piano and Pezhham Akhavass on percussion. Their show was absolutely lovely! We, in the Bay Area, are so lucky to be able to hold on to these great talents! I will show you pictures of them very soon.
After a short intermission, the fabulous Saeid Shanbehzadeh Ensemble took to the stage. You know, I spent a whole week next to these guys! I would like to admit, though, that nothing had prepared me for seeing them perform live onstage. Their performance is world class, and endlessly pleasing to the audience’s eyes and ears. What a great combination of talents to have–to be able to sing, talk, dance, and play multiple instruments onstage! Saeid Shanbehzadeh and his music ensemble have it all, and we were so lucky to be able to see it all live in the Bay Area! During the extremely well-choreographed performance, hearing Habib Meftah Boushehri’s sweet voice and percussion next to all the other instruments and movements, I felt like I had traveled to Boushehr, learning the landscape, the lifestyle, and the sweet dialect. What a wonderful combination of art, education, and nostalgia!
One of the best things about this week was a mini gathering of Iranian.com friends who came from as far away as Montreal, Canada, and as near as San Jose, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, California, to be near each other. Of course, we won’t even count Jahanshah, who had come all the way from Budapest! We had such a great time! At one point around a foyer of the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, I could count at least twelve well-known Iranian.com’ers who were hanging out and talking! Soon I will share a photo essay of our week-long adventures with the fabulous musicians and our lovely friends, new and old.
This may be a good opportunity to thank the fabulous volunteers and contributors of Iranian.com, Payam, Aria, Hadi, Vahid, and Hamid, who are fabulous and generous and a source of pride for any team project. Thanks guys!
Above is a photograph of Naghib Shanbehzadeh on Saturday night, taken by the fabulous San Francisco-based photographer, Raymond Van Tassel. Naghib is a 17-year-old musical genius, the one whose night this was, in my opinion. We had such a good audience, full of love, energy, and warmth. I think they loved all the artists, but this one, this one just melted everyone’s heart! I will tell you more soon.
