"The Bird of a Thousand Voices": A Journey into Tigran Hamasyan’s Visionary World of Sound and Storytell
Tigran Hamasyan
Pianist · Composer · Armenia
Ancient Armenia and progressive intensity, written into a single sound.
Why this conversation
Tigran Hamasyan plays the piano like someone trying to remember a language older than any of us. He grew up in Gyumri, left Armenia after an earthquake took his family's home, and built a career in jazz before deciding the most radical thing he could do was carry his own ancient culture forward. I wanted him here because almost no one alive is doing what he does: pulling folk melodies that feel a thousand years old through prog metal, electronics and improvisation, and making the seam between them disappear.
The road here
He gave up his first toy, a cassette player, for the piano at three, already figuring out songs by Queen and The Beatles. He was composing at five and found jazz at ten. But it was at thirteen, he says, that he "began to understand the rich culture of Armenia," and found his focus. He studied for a decade at the Tchaikovsky Specialized Music Academy alongside private jazz training, against a backdrop of hardship: a weak economy and the devastating earthquake in his hometown of Gyumri cost his parents their jobs and the family their home.
They emigrated to the United States in 2003. He passed through USC and the New School, then left to go professional, and the jazz world learned his name fast: first place at the Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano Competition in 2006, second at the Martial Solal in Paris, and a run of albums, World Passion, New Era, Red Hail, and A Fable in 2011. Around ninety percent of his recorded music is original, drawn, he says, from "traditional Armenian folk music, as well as poetry." Critics call his touch sublime and his virtuosity almost intimidating. He calls his own work, at various turns, punk jazz and metal. He is impossible to pin down, and that is rather the point.
The Bird of a Thousand Voices
His most expansive undertaking is far more than an album. It is a transmedia world of music, a documentary, a video game and visual artwork, all built around Hazaran Blbul, an ancient Armenian folktale handed down by storytellers around the fire. The legend of a mythical bird with countless voices becomes a coming-of-age parable about connection, courage and forgiveness, and a mirror for a world wrestling with ecological, psychological and spiritual strain. Hamasyan revives it partly to keep Armenian culture alive at a moment when he sees its heritage under threat, with historic manuscripts and monasteries at risk.
The music spans twenty-four compositions and moves between prog metal, ambient electronica, jazz and ethereal pop, each track rooted in Armenian folk melody and lifted by synths, cinematic texture and improvisation. "It is almost like a modern opera," he says. The sound is synthesised yet orchestral, conjuring melodies that might have existed in the time of ancient kingdoms like Aratta and Hayasa. "I tried to channel new Armenian melodies, some imagined melodies that could have been written in very ancient times."
He recorded with close collaborators, the drummer Nate Wood, whom he calls a musical brother, the vocalist Areni Agbabian, the bassist Mark Karapetian, and guests Sofia Jernberg and Vahram Sarkissian. The sessions were intense and strangely timed. "We tracked everything live in 4 days," he recalls. "On the 3rd day, March 11, 2020, we heard on the news that the world was closing down." After Wood flew home to New York, Hamasyan finished alone, weaving in contributions from around the world through Ableton until the whole thing felt at once intimate and vast. He premiered it at London's Cadogan Hall as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.
I hope this tale will bring love and, most importantly, forgiveness to people's hearts.
The conversation
How did the idea originate, and how did you collaborate with Ruben Van Leer to bring the folk tale Hazaran Blbul to life?
When I first read this ancient Armenian tale, handed down mainly through oral tradition, where storytellers would gather people around the fire, I felt it resonating with the world I live in now, a sense of eternity and timelessness. As I was finishing the music I called Ruben Van Leer, told him the story with great excitement, and sent a rough translation along with some music. As we worked on the staged piece, more ideas developed, and it became a multi-faceted transmedia project. Ruben and I became partners in creation. With his company truth.io he got involved in every aspect: transmedia music theatre, an online video game, a documentary-style clip, and an upcoming short film. We gathered a strong artistic team, the scenographer Boris Acket, the dramaturg Florian Helwig, the clothing designer Anna Marija Van Harten and others for the staged piece, and I brought in Karen Mirzoyan to direct the album artwork, the illustrator Khoren Matevosian, the photographer Vahan Stepanyan, and more.
How did you adapt the music for live performance, and what role do the visuals play?
Areni Agbabian, a singer and keyboardist, has a second role in the staged piece. She narrates the original story, written by the poet Serine, along with new text by our dramaturg Florian Helwig. Sometimes she is a mother telling a bedtime story to her child, sometimes she is the bird, and at the same time her music tells the story on another level. Ruben and Boris created an atmosphere that gives you the feeling of a bird that brings spiritual awakening. We really did not want to show the bird or put a screen on stage. The hero, Areg, is represented as a source of light.
As an Armenian composer, how important is it to share your heritage, and how does this project help preserve and evolve Armenian culture?
I feel that Armenian heritage, or any heritage, is really world heritage. Preserving cultural traditions thousands of years old matters enormously now. These folk songs and traditional arts were created for specific rites and ceremonies, most of which no longer exist or have lost their meaning, and people no longer understand them. In Armenia, until about a hundred years ago, the whole process of bread making was accompanied by music, from harvest to baking. It was ceremonial, and each singer projected their inner world into the process until the bread was made. Bread is sacred, and even now it is considered sacrilegious to throw it out. How many folk songs are being born at the bakery these days? Pretty much none. Folk arts have become museum artefacts and frozen time capsules, holding a universe of knowledge that was once alive and improvised every day. We should at least turn our heads toward it every once in a while, whatever modern society and its values dictate.
Latest, Manifeste
His newest work, Manifeste, is among his most searching and uncompromising: a vast, ritualistic body of work shaped by Armenian spiritual tradition, progressive intensity and fearless experimentation. It moves between explosive rhythmic architecture and stark vulnerability, weaving ancient modal language, choral resonance, electronics and his unmistakable pianism into a sound that feels both ancestral and urgently contemporary. The complexity never exists for its own sake; the grooves and progressive-metal force serve a search for transcendence through sound. It is music that confronts suffering without losing wonder, and embraces myth without abandoning modernity, the work of a composer, pianist and producer at full artistic scale.
Buy or stream Manifeste
