The King
Kader Abdolah
(Canongate)
Review Tom Mooney
William Dalrymple, who revisits our shores for the 2014 festival of literature in Borris, has notably hailed Kader Abdolah’s The King as fabulous in both senses of the word: a knowing fable full of charm and deceptively simple in its storytelling.
The King may indeed read like one of the late Angela Carter’s fairy tales transposed into the 19th century Qajar Persian court, told by a masterful and addictive storyteller.
Abdolah’s gift is to keep the slow fire burning in the midst of a maelstrom, to unveil a matrix of plots which simmer patiently on the back burner until their time has come, at the heart of which is Naser Muhammad Fatali Mozafar, a Persian prince born into the royal court of Tehran. The young shah has 374 iffy brothers, a mother as Machiavellian as Livia in I Claudius and a harem of 230 wives, which requires servicing beyond his stamina, continuously drained by the tendency of the modern world to encroach across the borders of his medieval kingdom to sieve his country’s subterranean resources
The King – as a sepulchral fairy tale – has many plots within plots as a stray dog has fleas, a tattered web of etiolated silk, at the centre of which is the apparently omniscient Shah Naser, kept in tune with the changing world outside by the tributary of knowledge that is his personal grand vizier, plying his trade like Arachne in the shadow of Minerva
In this constellation, each star will have its day, and though Shah Naser is introduced as a pampered crown prince, he metamorphoses into a tyrant ably disposed to severing a limb or two to save the corporeal kingdom.
Abdolah – a pen name created in memoriam to friends who died from persecution in Iran – has lived in political exile in Holland for quarter of a century, and you don’t need to tax the imagination to draw parallels between The King and the tortured history of modern Iran: the Shah is both gilded lily and despot, cat loving and trigger happy, brooding lover and blood thirsty megalomaniac, a lanceolate monarch with an ingot for a heart. But above all, as the crimson tide ebbs and flows and the cast list diminishes, a born survivor, who learns to stand on his own two feet but always, you suspect, a victim in waiting to his hubristic arrogance.
Abdolah, who joined a secret leftist party that fought against the dictatorship of the Shah and the subsequent reign of the ayatollahs, is an impeccable, almost detached writer, with the pulse of his engagement just about audible, but with The King he has unearthed the best modern fairly tale in the tradition of 1001 Nights since Craig Thompson’s Habibi.
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Norwegian Woods
Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic
(ACT Music)
Review Tom Mooney
ACT Music has released the second live recording from its Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic concert series, re-establishing a tradition begun by American jazz impresario Norman Granz. Norwegian Woods brings together some of the finest Norwegian jazz musicians including pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, singer Solveig Slettahjell, guitarist Knut Reiersrud and cutting edge piano trio In The Country, in a unique collaboration featuring interpretations of traditional Nordic music, John Hiatt and Tom Waits.
A blues guitar introduces Norwegian Woods, restrained, elegiac and yet full of energy. A clear, female voice takes over, its power potentiated by its uncanny serenity. A piano gathers together the theme one more time before all of them, joined by an additional trio, take it through a mightily dynamic loop until it tapers out to almost nothing in the end.
Ingen Vinner Frem Til Den Evige Ro is the name of the old Norwegian church song that Knut Reiersrud, Solveig Slettahjell and In The Country transform so fascinatingly into a modern Nordic hymn in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic.
It was another one of those magic moments that the Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic series so reliably produces. Founded in 2012 and curated by Siggi Loch, the idea was to craft inimitable evenings by means of thematic concentration, but most of all with stirring, often first-time encounters between outstanding musicians. And so it was on the fourth evening documented on this recording, which went under the heading of Norwegian Woods.
This concert demonstrated the reasons for the almost mystical success of Norwegian jazz not only in the aforementioned introduction, but also, for example, in the contemplation of its roots in Norwegian folk and classical music.
That Norway was quite simply too far off the beaten track for touring American jazz musicians seventy years ago helped it develop its own vocabulary – the “Nordic sound” made popular by Jan Garbarek et al – and that sound today is part of the DNA of Norwegian jazz, whether through the multi-stylistic electronic pioneer Bugge Wesseltoft, Solveig Slettahjell, or by young guns like Morten Qvenild.
It is a sound that is inconceivable without an almost unconditional openness to influences of all kinds: in the none-too-large Norwegian music scene, jazzers have no qualms about working together with classical musicians and colleagues from the world of pop and rock, which leads to compelling outcomes, such as those of the JABP tryst of the blues musician Knut Reiersrud and various jazz icons, be they in the adapted traditional, Nordic-expanse-breathing Sæterjentens Søndag or in surprising interpretations like Tom Waits’ Take it With Me.
