Aga Khan Music Initiative and Klangkosmos, a network of 20 local cultural organizations in the industrial region of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, have joined forces to co-present a series of performances and educational activities by the Badakhshan Ensemble, who hail from Tajikistan, according to the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN).
The tour, which runs from May 3 – 19 May, is visiting twelve cities in western Germany, including Dusseldorf, Siegen, Bonn, and Wuppertal, as well as the Dutch city of Leiden, and the Belgian capital Brussels.
Performances, workshops, and master classes will be held in jazz venues, schools, community centers, and concert halls with the aim of introducing diverse audiences to the unique rhythms, melodies, and traditional instruments of Tajikistan’s Badakhshan region.
Badakhshan—poetically known in Persian as Bam-i Jahan, the “Roof of the World”—comprises the sparsely populated eastern half of Tajikistan and northeast Afghanistan, where the Pamir Mountains reach heights only slightly lower than those of the Himalayas.
The Badakhshan Ensemble was born from lead singer Soheba Davlatshoyeva’s wish to share traditional music, song and dance from her native region with a wider audience. Badakhshani music maintains a strong regional identity, and includes a rich variety of instrumental and vocal genres whose lyrics draw on the Sufi-inspired verse of the great mystical poets Rumi and Hafez as well as on a local tradition of mystical poetry.
Most Badakhshanis are Shia Ismaili Muslims, and Ismaili practices and beliefs have had a strong influence on expressive culture in the Pamir Mountain region, where Ismaili communities have existed for close to a millennium. The ensemble’s performances prominently feature the piercing vocal style falak and extended spiritual songs called maddoh along with asymmetrical trance-like rhythms that infuse Badakhshani music and animate its spiritual power
