Biography
In the early decades of the twentieth century, numerous troubadours throughout the Middle East took their stage names from the instruments they played. Among the most acclaimed stood Oudi Hrant, whose title derived from the oud. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he cultivated an enormous following among Armenians around the globe and toured the United States between the 1920s and 1950s, appearing in both concert halls and private homes. He gained particular renown for ghazels, a Middle Eastern counterpart to the blues that paired scat singing with austere accompaniment and lyrics steeped in raw emotion. That intensity surfaced most clearly in “Hasta Yim” (“I Am Sick”), where Hrant voiced his anguish at never beholding “the great wonders of [his] homeland,” a loss compounded by his blindness and by the Armenian genocide. Only a handful of his performances were ever captured, the scarce 1960s album Turkish Delights serving as one rare example, and those recordings typically stemmed from informal sessions. Decades afterward, oudist Richard Hagopian, a devoted student of Hrant’s style, committed several of the master’s pieces to disc, among them “Sirdus Vura Kar Ma Ga,” “Anush Yares Heratza,” “Ghurgeet Chant,” and “Parov Yegar Siroon Yar.”