SUNY New Paltz will welcome the acclaimed jazz and world music performer and scholar Hafez Modirzadeh for a one-night-only performance on Tuesday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Studley theatre.
Modirzadeh, who is the University’s 2024 Davenport Resident for New American Music, will perform the world premiere of “Beyond Song,” a new work for saxophone and piano with Alex Peh, associate professor in the Department of Music, which is supported by a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts project grant.
Additional pieces featured at this concert include selections from Modirzadeh’s 2021 album Facets, as well as new compositions, inspired by Modirzadeh’s work, by SUNY New Paltz music faculty and students.
About Hafez Modirzadeh
Modirzadeh’s work is global in scope and highly collaborative in nature. He has referred to it as the “tapping and mapping of a sonic indigeneity” that includes, along with Persian dastgah, Filipino kulintang, Turkish makam, Andalucian flamenco, along with American jazz and other cultural systems. He has performed with luminaries spanning generations, including Ornette Coleman, Tyshawn Sorey, Don Cherry, Zakir Hussein and Vijay Iyer.
He is currently Professor of Creative/World Music at San Francisco State University, where his work has focused on cross-cultural music, jazz and ethnomusicology. His artistic scholarship encompasses original concepts such as chromodality, aural archetypes and compost music, and has been published in such journals as Black Music Research, Leonardo, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Popular Music Studies.
His Grammy-nominated work on saxophones can be heard on Pi Recordings. Critical evaluations have described him as working towards “an entirely new mode of expression” (Chicago Reader), with “a feeling of rich uncertainty” (New York Times) that serves as a “blueprint for pancultural parity” (Downbeat).
An expanded biography is available on the website of San Francisco State University.
About “Beyond Song”
The debut performance of this work by Peh and Modirzadeh explores Afro/Asian-inspired tunings for the piano that emerge from the experience of making music cross-culturally. The piece uses Persian notation to represent tones that do not exist on a piano in standard tuning – and so, the New Paltz Department of Music has re-tuned the concert instruments and practice instruments to make their performance of “Beyond Song” possible. These tunings project timbral inflections that belong to modalities found in Persian music that are highly personal and specific to the piece and the performer.
In preparation for this piece, Modirzadeh invited Peh to California to meet his sister, who at the time was in hospice. Modirzadeh explained that as each of us nears our inevitable transformation, we are all, in a way, in hospice, and so should be more caring for one another. “Beyond Song” is about the quiet ways in which we may potentially comfort one another in spite of our differences. Then, if we really listen, we may hear beyond the familiar melody to reach another kind of resonance – one that ultimately brings resolution to the soul.
About the Davenport Residency for New American Music at SUNY New Paltz
The Kenneth Davenport Residency is made possible by the University’s Kenneth Davenport Endowment, established in 1985 by the School of Fine & Performing Arts and the Davenport Family. This program supports residencies for contemporary American composers to share their work with students.
Six outstanding musicians have been recognized as Davenport Residents since 2015. More information about the Residency is available here.
