Saturday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim performed her “Madman of God” song cycle live for the first time. The debut no doubt added to the urgency of the moment, the near-giddiness of the playing; it also made for a certain nervousness between songs on Deyhim’s part, and a few rather ragged endings. But by the time Deyhim and her five-piece orchestra were through, they more than deserved the rapturous standing ovation they received.
“Madman of God” is Deyhim’s most recent project and her first solo album. Because she is best known as a singer with avant-garde leanings, particularly because of her collaborations with Richard Horowitz and the visual artist Shirin Neshat, “Madman” is in many ways a departure for her. It consists of ancient sacred songs by Sufi masters such as Rumi and Hafez, each one an ecstatic calling to divine love. In addition, “Madman” calls for Deyhim, who prefers to improvise without language, to sing in her native Persian tongue.
Of course, Deyhim, who chatted briefly about the intersection between the ancient and the modern, has her own unique take on this music. To begin with, while most Sufi vocalists sing in higher registers — Reza Derakhshani, one of her collaborators on “Madman,” suggests this may be so because the genre predates amplification — Deyhim sings at a deliberately lower level. Her voice is husky and dark, with a surprisingly broad and seemingly effortless range. Perhaps more important, Deyhim has an amazing control: She can sweep, whisper, vibrate, howl, growl, scat.
And while Deyhim, who arranged the music and produced the project live and on record, certainly employs traditional Iranian instruments, she’s not averse to introducing Western elements. At the MCA, cellist Dawn Bukholz Andrews added a haunting melody line. At times, she played the cello almost like a percussion instrument, hitting the strings with bow or hand. Tabla player Karsh Kale toyed with synth pads.
Derakhshani, who played only traditional instruments, often made them wail like bluesy electric guitars; this was particularly true in his intro to “Negara” and on the jam the group offered as an encore. His solos occupied a demilitarized zone between the sublime and the whimsical, the sacred and profane.
Indeed, if there was an MVP here, it had to be Derakhshani. Besides playing setar (a small wooden four-stringed instrument), tar (a skin-covered instrument usually with six strings but altered by Derakhshani to have eight), kamancheh (a tiny four-stringer played with a bow like a cello, but with a much higher pitch), and the ney (a bamboo flute whose mouthpiece is placed between the upper front teeth), he provided an eerie backup vocal, lower than Deyhim, which worked like a shadow or ghost behind her.
Also on the bill was U-Cef, a dance-music outfit whose principal guiding force and inspiration is the fusion of Moroccan traditional music and American dance funk. They were fun enough, but the staid MCA theater was the wrong setting. These guys need a dance floor.
