Using Farsi and flamenco to share a personal journey | Photo by Kristine Cofsky

Mashregh will be performing selections from their debut album, Bird Dance, at the Blueshore Centre on Oct. 1.

Vancouver-based Persian Flamenco singer Farnaz Ohadi leads the ensemble, bringing together Persian poetry and flamenco dance and guitar as a means of conveying Ohadi’s journey of challenges and empowerment.

Bringing together Farsi and flamenco

Born and raised in Iran, Ohadi first came across flamenco music through her father’s tapes. While she enjoyed the music style, it was difficult to fully grasp flamenco without a cultural frame of reference:

“I would listen but it had no context. But when we went to Spain when I was around 14 or 15, everything came together. I was overwhelmed with wanting to be a part of it.”

Ohadi wanted to pursue this kind of music, but attitudes towards women in music were unwelcoming at the time in Iran, which was in the midst of cultural and political turmoil in the aftermath of the country’s revolution in the late ‘70s.

For her education and future, Ohadi and her family moved to Toronto, where it occurred to her that flamenco was something she could potentially pursue. This began her journey of learning to dance flamenco, of improvising musically, and in speaking and singing in Spanish and continuing to grow as an artist.

Eventually, however, Ohadi felt that there was a need to take a risk to define her musical identity: to take on the daunting prospect of singing flamenco in Farsi.

“It was very difficult because the Farsi language is very subtle, very quiet, and Spanish is not like that. So it took four years of constantly hammering at it, with a lot of doubt, like, `Am I going to get away with this?’ But Canada is amazing for (cultural and musical risks) because everybody’s doing something different. If you can’t do it in Canada, you can’t do it anywhere else,” says Ohadi.

The project started coming together when she met guitarist Liron Man, to whom she introduced her Farsi style of flamenco singing. Ohadi says Man was not only familiar with flamenco, but also resonated with the Middle-Eastern musical context that she was bringing to the style, himself originally being from Israel.

She credits Man with finding many instrumentalists in the ensemble, Mashregh, and pushing them out of their musical comfort zone to bring their sound and personality to the performances and the album.

A story of challenge and perseverance

In the four years since undertaking this blend of flamenco and Farsi poetry, Ohadi says that each musical decision on the debut album, Birdcall, was made purposefully. Whether it’s in choosing instrumentation, deciding between traditional Farsi ten-beat poem meter or flamenco’s twelve-beat rhythm, or in selecting excerpts of poems that are performed, every aspect is brought together in a new context to tell Ohadi’s personal story.

“All the issues I had with immigration – all that fell back on my piano. It was very comforting to have that, and it took so long to get [to Canada], but it feels so right. That’s what the whole album is about – from song one to song eight – the album chronicles all of it. It’s all the things I’ve experienced, so it’s very personal,” she says.

From the symbolism of a singing bird in a cage, to songs about the sacrifice of leaving behind culture for the sake of one’s future, to finding your own spiritual truth, Ohadi hopes that women can relate to her experiences and the challenges that she’s faced.

“What I can do is give voice to the women who experienced what I experienced, and there are plenty of them. The thought in Iran was that any woman who wanted to sing was doing it to allure and distract. I wanted to say that there are many female musicians who want to talk about more than attraction,” she says.

For more information on Farnaz Ohadi and Mashregh, visit www.mashreghmusic.com