Genre fusion clearly knows no bounds in the 21st Century. In Luys i Luso (Light from the Light), jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan is peeling back the layers of the Soviet Union and "a hundred years of atheism" to reveal the most ancient, and so far, stagnant, motifs of Armenian hymns.
With Eastern Orthodox Catholic worship largely quelled, or at least deterred, throughout Soviet reign, Hamasyan's heritage is beckoning him to take an interest in the Armenian hymns he heard as a teenager. His intentions are to further a style that has largely faded into history, where it was once an element of everyday life. NPR recently spotlighted jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan's journey through his own culture in the wake of his latest and most personal album.
Performed with the Yerevan State Chamber Choir, one of the sample Armenian hymns provided by NPR, "Your Mercy is Boundless (Basum en Quo gtutyunqd)," sounds positively Gregorian at the outset, laden with the earliest shades of polyphony. Nevertheless, the stoic and shifting pedal supplies the melody with boundless solemnity. Most striking is how Hamasyan uses the piano to close off and bind phrases together. Progressively, these pivotal moments are joined by ever-increasing density, as if the tonal complexities of the jazz age were staring down the prayerful drones of a monastic order.
The piano solo that follows does everything to maintain the piety, but it also appears to take on the role of narrator, using the more reflective and mood-captivating techniques of early 20th Century impressionists (curiously, a time period when Armenia's history, along with its religious and cultural identity, was about to be turned on its head).
Armenia transitioned from Ottoman statehood to a nation decimated by genocide, and finally into an oppressed Soviet satellite. This collectively left the country and its musical past in a state of cultural hiatus, or according to Hamasyan, "in the shadow." The resulting tribute, Luys i Luso, promises to reveal this ancient past to the world, featuring Armenian hymns up to 1,500 years old. Barely invaded by its modern elements, Hamasyan's "renovation" of this ancient material uses the figurative dalliances of improvisation, made palatable by an execution as delicate as an archeologist's touch.
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