Mockroot

1. To Love
2. Song for Melan and Rafik
3. Kars 1
4. Double-Faced 5
5. The Roads That Bring Me Closer to You
6. Lilac
7. Entertain Me
8. The Apple Orchard in Saghmosavanq
9. Kars 2 (Wounds of the Centuries)
10. To Negate
11. The Grid
12. Out of The Grid

Tigran Hamasyan’s Nonesuch Records debut album, Mockroot, will be released in February 2015. Pre-orders include an instant download of the album tracks "Entertain Me" and "The Apple Orchard in Saghmosavanq. Tigran’s music draws from a wide range of sources—from jazz and Armenian folk music; Bach and French fin de siècle composers; dubstep, thrash metal, and contemporary electronica. His live performances and six studio albums have received enthusiastic approval from the likes of Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Brad Mehldau.

Where his last album, 2013’s Shadow Theatre, featured an extended band with choral sections, strings, and saxes, Mockroot is based around the tight trio of Tigran on piano and vocals, Sam Minaie on bass guitar, and Arthur Hnatek on drums.

"For me it’s more like an electro-acoustic Armenian rock trio than a regular jazz trio," says Tigran. "Sometimes we sound like a heavy metal band, or a dubstep DJ, or like some late 19th century Armenian composers like Nikoghayos Tigranyan and Komitas, with newer harmonic and rhythmic approaches. It’s all underlined by something that’s very simple, melancholic, and romantic."

The album title, Mockroot, touches on a theme that suffuses the album—one of the natural world always triumphing over human complexity. "It is inspired by the photograph on the album cover," he says, "a picture my friend Karen Mirzoyan took of a tree—almost dead—emerging from a lake. It was taken in a part of the world where people had deliberately raised the water level to irrigate land. And yet this tree just carried on, defiantly. It’s the idea that nature is constantly mocking humanity. Whatever we impose upon it, nature will always win. Technology has taken us into crazy areas, but we need a core of humanity to make sense of the world.

"To me this album is kind of sad and melancholic. Even the brainier or more math-oriented songs have a sort of romanticism and longing in them. The songs represent a critique of our world and humans as they are now, which is more materialistic and less spiritual, less humble and thankful, more ignorant and egotistically ‘happy,’ a lot of knowledge, but about what values? People are loving, but we love money and ourselves; we are technologically more advanced and ready to ignore love in the name of ‘progress,’ healthier and stronger, more scared and faithless. There are more tractors cultivating the soil and fewer folk songs being cultivated; there are more churches than there are people who still remember how to pray.

"Mockroot is a sort of longing and nostalgia for a human nature that’s more spiritual, more loving, more together with its roots. There is a sacrifice in it—sacrifice to try to elevate spiritually."

Tigran Hamasyan was born in 1987 in Gyumri, near Armenia’s border with Turkey. Neither of his parents were musicians (his father was a jeweller, his mother a clothing designer), and Tigran grew up listening to his father’s heavy rock collection (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Queen, Nazareth). By the age of three, he was picking out pop melodies on the family piano and being sent to piano lessons; from the age of six he was attending a specialist music conservatory. By 11 he was a classical virtuoso who also sang jazz standards and Beatles tunes with a big band; by 13 he was experimenting with Armenian folk music. At 16, after winning the Montreux Jazz Festival’s piano competition, he relocated with his family to Los Angeles, where he released his debut album, World Passion, at the age of 18.

For more than a decade, Tigran Hamasyan has been part of California’s sizeable Armenian-American community, but he has spent much of the last year living in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, with his grandmother. "In April I went to Armenia to teach some master classes for a month. It rekindled a yearning I’ve had for many years to return, and I found some great stuff while I was there. It was very inspiring."

Armenia looms large throughout Mockroot. The opening track, "To Love," and "To Negate" are both inspired by the Armenian poet Petros Duryan. "Lilac" is about a tree that stood in the backyard of Tigran’s childhood home; "Song for Melan and Rafik" is dedicated to his grandparents; "The Apple Orchard in Saghmosavanq" is a romantic song about a monastery near Yerevan. "Kars 1" and "Kars 2 (Wounds of the Centuries)" are written about the town of Kars, the ancestral home of Tigran’s maternal grandparents, a place that became part of Turkey in the years that followed the infamous Ottoman genocide of Armenians during the First World War.

Although the subject matter has implicitly political overtones, Tigran avoids making these explicit. "I try not to get sidetracked by politics," he says. "Some people are more interested in using music as a platform for politics. I want to be a musician, not a politician. For me, it’s more personal.

"Armenian folk songs are sometimes political whether you like it or not—especially given the fact that 90 per cent of Armenian folk music and culture comes from a part of the country that is now in Turkey. That culture is still alive, thanks to the great-grandpas and -grandmas that kept and transferred their songs and dances to the younger generation after migrating from old Armenian cities like Van, Mush, Karin (Erzurum) and Sasun to what is now eastern Armenia. So, for me, it’s about learning what they have kept for me and about stories that arise from that situation."

Many of the tracks are inspired by poetry, in particular the flowering of Armenian and Russian verse of the late 19th and early 20th century. "I’ve always read a lot of poetry, ever since I was a teenager," he says. "I’d listen to Jan Garbarek or Keith Jarrett for hours, and then immerse myself in Armenian poetry. It will inspire specific feelings. Occasionally I will play the piano while reading a poem, accompanying the words, but usually I will try and recreate the feelings inspired by a certain poems while improvising at the piano." Several of these poems are printed in full as part of the album sleeve notes. However, despite this congruence between words and music, most of Tigran’s songs are wordless.

"When playing melodies inspired by Armenian folk songs, I sometimes try singing English language lyrics, but English sounds off-putting and unnatural and weird in the songs, while Armenian lyrics sound too direct. Lyrics can be magical, but they can often direct you to a certain place that is quite different from where the music is taking you. By singing wordlessly, you’re not obliging the audience to think about a certain thing—it can be about anything. You are relinquishing ownership to the audience, which is exciting." —John Lewis. John writes about music for the Guardian, Uncut and Metro.