Hello to all my friends and thanks to all those who supported my first post and encouraged me to continue my work here. As I said before, my language is Persian and I use online translators to translate my writings into English. So I apologize in advance if the text is not translated correctly. If you have not read the previous post, I suggest you take a look at it first and then read this text. Because this is a real story of my work to establish and promote IGM Magazine, which I will tell you in successive posts.
The image you see is a post I posted on my personal Instagram page, during which I officially announced that I have decided to launch a cultural and artistic magazine in cyberspace. This image was actually the window of my view to the music world ahead and these people were musicians that I had known through Instagram until that day, and after this post, my personal page practically turned into an Instagram magazine. I wrote in the caption of this post: Last night when I slept I was a ordinary person and today I woke up thinking that I want to be a journalist. Now the first question is, why did I think of this?
To answer this question, I must first introduce you to the people you see in the picture and tell you why the picture of these people should appear in the first poster I shared under the title IGM.
Erfan was my guitar teacher in those days. I was a resident of Gorgan in Golestan province in northeastern Iran. I lived alone and away from the rest of my family who lived in Tehran. Of course not quite alone. With 5 dogs in different sizes and breeds. I taught business and economics three or four days a week and spent the rest of my time practicing guitar.
Erfan lived in Sanandaj in the province of Kurdistan in western Iran, and it was not long before I started learning metal techniques and speed-up mechanisms online with his help. Erfan played the classical guitar well. He knew the blues and as a guitarist was a member of a metal band called "Jil" in his hometown. It had been a while since we started our classes that the thought came to me that at the age of 37, how long do I need to reach my level of playing. Of course, Erfan was 10 years younger than me , but he was much ahead of me in terms of playing guitar level. This made me think why such a musician is so unknown at this level of skill and in the Iranian art and music community the name of him and others like him is not mentioned and they are not known? And how lucky I am to be able to reach this level of music and only then become one of the few musicians like Erfan whose only stage is the corner of their room and whose only way is to connect with the world outside the lens of mobile cameras and platforms like Instagram.
But Farshid A'rabi and Homayoun Majdzadeh have different stories rather than Erfan. These two are among the oldest guitarists and oldest metal musicians in Iran who have inspired many young guitarists by training and introducing them as a new generation of musicians in this style to the Iranian music community. But even they, who I was very interested to know musicians like them in Iran, were unknown to me, and I wondered why it should be that I know many good musicians in the world and follow their musics, but I have no information about the most musicians in my country! Why there is no sign of such people in the domestic media of Iran, at least, and no one knows them except a limited community that follows them closely.
Ehsan Imani, Aiden Hassanzadeh and Farzin Emami can be considered as a generation after Farshid Arabi and Homayoun Majdzadeh. Very professional guitarists , of course, had the same fate as their previous generations in this style of music in Iran. That is, only in this small community were musicians of this style somewhat known and no trace of them could be found in the popular and state-owned public media.
Isn't it the duty of every government to support and develop the culture and art of that society ?!
Arshia Ravan and Saman Saibani, however, were among the very new generation of this music community in Iran, which according to this image may be called the third generation. Young guitarists with great skills and motivation and the ability to work in international projects. In those days, Arshia had released an album called "Trio to the 80's" and tried to promote it with the help of his Instagram page, and Saman Saybani is that guitarist who I talked about him in the first post last week .The person who I did my first interview about the sweeping technique with him for IGM .
Among these people, the situation of Adel Rohnavaz is a little different. He is also a very young musician and about 10 years younger than me. Very professional and creative guitarist , and much more popular than the other people you see in this picture. Of course, it cannot be said that the reason for his recognition in the music community and inside Iran is his high level of playing. It is because of his collaboration with a pop singer in Iran (https://instagram.com/mohsenchavoshi?utm_medium=copy_link ) who operates under government law and is allowed to hold concerts in various cities, he has been able to attract a large audience and may be considered more successful than the other guitarists in the picture.
This was the information I had that day about my favorite music and musicians active in these genres in Iran. So, with the publication of this post in instagram , I prepared a list of Iranian musicians I knew up to that day, and by publishing it, I announced that I intend to conduct video interviews with them remotely and ask them my questions and give their answers to my friends. Share myself and the contacts I had on my Instagram page.
I also thought to myself, it could be so good if, in addition to musicians, I do similar interviews with the audience of this style of music in Iran and ask their opinion , and I named the whole project IGM PROJECT. I made a questionair and started sending messages to those who I thought might be the right people to take part in this research project by interviewing .
In the next post, I will share with you the first people who did or did not participated in the interviews and the results , and the issues that arose for me from more professional musicians.
Stay with me ...
