Me in London With Hamed Nikpay

A couple of weeks ago I was in London with a great Persian singer and multi-instrumentalist called Hamed Nikpay to play a show and do a live in-studio recording for the BBC Persia channel. The show was at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea, and the recording session was at one of London’s famous rehearsal and recording studios, Premises Studios and was for the BBC’s Persian channel.

I had never played with Hamed before (or with any Persian musicians – except for a few rehearsals and a little warm-up gig we did in L.A. before we left), but he always has a flamenco guitarist with him (usually my good friend Alfredo Cáceres, who couldn’t make these dates), as he likes the vibe that gives. I don’t know much about Persian music, but apparently this is fusion and that’s the sound he likes, and it certainly sounds right. The musical director was sax player Farzin Farhadi, the percussionist was Greg Ellis (who did the percussion for the ‘Matrix’ movies and ‘300’ and tons of other movies among other cool stuff he’s done), and the bass player was Eric Klerks, who besides being a great bass player is the one of the guitarists with the Magic Band. There were also two dancers – Paris-based Persian dancer Sharokh Moshkin Ghalam and Paris-based flamenco dancer Karen Gonzales.

You can see some of the great photos shot for the BBC at Cadogan Hall here, and you can see some of my not-so-amazing photos of the trip in the gallery below. Here’s a video that has some interviews with the guys in Farsi and some good footage of the show. The BBC recording aired the other day, but then it moved and I can’t find it since I can’t read Farsi…. It was a fun trip to rainy London with some great musicians and some new music (to me, anyway).