NYC Radio Live · David Ellenbogen, host

Kayhan Kalhor - a conversation with the master

October 29, 2025·37 min·3 clips

Kayhan Kalhor explains that 'Kamancha' means 'little hunting bow' in Farsi — suggesting the instrument is older than civilization itself, played by hunter-gatherers before the dawn of cities.

1. NYC Radio Live host David Ellenbogen speaks with Kayhan Kalhor, Iranian Kamancha master, in a live radio interview connecting New York to Tehran. 2. Kalhor describes himself as 60 years old and at a stage where sound has become the central issue of his playing, superseding technical concerns. 3. The episode's core thread is the relationship between tradition, innovation, and survival — how an instrument and its music can evolve without dying. 4. Kalhor explains that the Kamancha's distinctive tone comes from a sheepskin-covered resonating box and a specific bowing approach that preserves rather than dampens harmonics — he compares the resulting sound to the rough warmth of Ben Webster's saxophone. 5. The name 'Kamancha' means 'little hunting bow' in Farsi — 'Kaman' being the Farsi word for hunting bow — which Kalhor argues makes it one of the oldest, possibly pre-civilizational, bowed instruments in existence. 6. He traces the instrument's geographic spread eastward to China and Japan and westward to Europe, where it is the ancestor of the rebab and the viola da gamba. 7. Kalhor began at age 5 on his brother's fan-tar (dulcimer), moved to Persian violin under teacher Mr. Ahmed Mohajer — a student of the legendary Ustad Sabah — and fell in love with the Kamancha after seeing Ustad Bahari on television at around age 10 to 12. 8. Because he lived in western Iran with no Kamancha teachers, he taught himself by listening obsessively to Ustad Bahari's recordings, only later gaining access to formal instruction when the family moved to Tehran. 9. He describes the Kamancha as having been a nearly extinct instrument when he began — Ustad Bahari was one of perhaps one or two serious players — with a gap of 40-50 years in which almost no one played it. 10. Today, Kalhor estimates there are hundreds of thousands of Kamancha players in Iran, which he attributes to a generation of musicians who modernized the instrument's vocabulary through extended techniques including pizzicato and tapping. 11. He argues that musical traditions must adapt to each generation in order to survive, comparing it to the evolution of the English language over six centuries. 12. His cross-cultural collaboration with sitar player Shujat Khan in the late 1990s was his first 'fusion' project; he describes Persian and North Indian music as 'twin children raised in different families' — sharing deep structural similarities but with different accents. 13. He traces the shared ancestry of North Indian classical music back to Persian influence, including instruments like the sitar and tabla and compositional forms like qawwali. 14. After the Iranian Revolution and subsequent war, Kalhor left Iran with some money and traveled through Turkey (nine months), Romania, the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Bosnia), and Italy over approximately three years before enrolling at Carleton University in Ottawa. 15. He notes his route roughly paralleled the historical westward migration of the Roma people from Persia, though he never reached Spain as they did. 16. He describes his ideal performance context as solo or duo improvisation — 'that's where my heart is' — using mode selection as the main structural anchor rather than memorized traditional melodies. 17. He says he has progressively moved away from traditional melody fragments toward pure modal improvisation, and has incorporated folk elements from different regions of Iran that were previously considered improper in classical performance. 18. His theory of folk music: through thousands of years, only the most beautiful melodies survived audience selection, making folk music a kind of 'purification of beauty' that art musicians should study rather than dismiss. 19. The conversation has an intimate, respectful register — Ellenbogen as a listener who saw Kalhor perform in Saugerties and produces the Ragas Live Festival; Kalhor reflective and philosophical. 20. Best for listeners interested in Persian classical music, world music cross-cultural collaboration, or the philosophy of tradition and musical evolution.

As heard by us

A measured radio conversation about the kamancheh, its tone, and the lineage behind a singular sound.

Kayhan Kalhor's conversation on the kamancheh starts with the Saugerties performance and then opens into a plain but absorbing account of how sound becomes identity.

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Why you'd press play

Hear Kayhan Kalhor trace the kamancheh's low, human sound through lineage, memory, and hard-won craft.

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