Exploring Genius with Reza and the Beatles

Concert Review by Stephen Smith

It is a long way from the deserts of Iran to the rain-swept streets of Liverpool, England, but someone who has made the leap is musician/ world-traveler Reza Ganjavi.  In his tribute to the genius of the Beatles, performed in Ojai, California, on June 26, Reza stretched the repertoire from the days of the Beatles’ first #1 hit Please, please me to the post-break-up period of John Lennon’s Imagine.  Thirty-eight numbers were played in all.

             The concert began with Reza’s solo performance of a number of classical pieces written or arranged for guitar.  These included works by Bach, Albeñiz, Tárrega, and Gaspar Sanz, all of which feature on his two CDs, In Friendship and Dancing Hands, as do his variations on the theme of Greensleeves.  Reza is nothing if not eclectic!  His first Beatles song was Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night—actually a paean to the release of the creative spirit—and this he followed with Yesterday.  Interestingly, Reza, whose Krishnamurti connection is well known, changed the lyrics of the song to, I don’t believe in yesterday, a process he repeated in his rendition of Imagine.  This reinvention of meaning puts one in mind of Edward Fitzgerald’s “transmogrification” of the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, one of the most famous of Persian poets, which becomes, in his hands, an aesthete’s drinking song, rather than the Sufi poem it originally was.  We slip in and out of meanings, and so it was with Reza.

             The Beatles were, of course, a “group,” the first (and best) of many that emerged in England during the early sixties.  But, unlike the Rolling Stones or The Who, they did not have a lead singer, nor were they as close to their R&B roots.  It is their harmonizing as much as the lead voice that gives them their distinctive, their unique, sound.  To this extent, they are reminiscent of close-harmony ensembles; rhythmically, they are also allied to their own origins in skiffle.  It is difficult for a solo performer to convey all this, and Reza devoted considerable ingenuity to “filling in the gaps”—with whistling, clapping, and short vocal riffs.  Nonetheless, it was noticeable that when Reza was joined by David Anter (percussion) and Phil Maynes (guitar) the songs gained in density and depth.  I particularly enjoyed Phil and Reza’s rendition of I feel fine, a number which demonstrated—if demonstration were necessary—just how much melodic richness, harmonic finesse, and rhythmic vitality go to make up a Beatles song.  That tide of genius which characterized the sixties and wrote the pages of The Lennon-McCartney Songbook—and which neither of them, singly, ever quite repeated—was here put on stage in a new form & guise, often with oral footnotes from Reza.

             It is a characteristic of genius that it looks a little different each time you look at it: it has multiple, infinite, possibilities.  What Reza’s performance brought out, paradoxically, was the Englishness of the Beatles’ work.  It is a cloth of many interweaving strands, and skiffle, rock ‘n’ roll, and close harmony are just three of them.  There is also the English Music Hall tradition, on which they draw so magnificently in their summum album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Outward in performance, genius looks inward; it looks back & down to its own roots.  It was the fact that the Beatles found their own roots that made their sound so complex and compelling.  They were “out of” rock ‘n’ roll, certainly, but “by” the popular theater of the streets, pantomime, the circus, the pub piano sing-along.  They had no static metaphor and that is why, unlike the Rolling Stones, they lend themselves to many and to all.  They owe their staggering, enduring popularity to the fact that they were truly of the people—all people, all around the world.  This did not prevent them from being “local,” as evidenced in the detail of Penny Lane.  In fact, it is the switch from intimacy to universality that is one of the striking features of their work.  The “ten-bob note” of Mean Mr Mustard is only a breath away from the “brotherhood of man” to which Imagine aspires.  

Reza began and ended with solo renderings, often at the suggestion of the audience.  This helped bring about a participatory atmosphere. Most of the old-time favorites were there—Let it Be, Twist & Shout, Ticket to Ride, etc—and the evening ended with All my Loving.  It was a genuine tribute to genuine genius.

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some comments [REST ARE IN comments_music file]:

Hi Reza, Thanks so much for your concert last night. I had a lot of fun, which is what Beatles music is all about. Your energy and musicianship were great. Kenneth

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Wow, that's an amazing review!
can't wait to see it for myself.
SOLMAZ

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this article should be submitted to the ojai valley news. great job reza and steve

Karen

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it's very well written, very impressive and professional.
what is missing to me? (since you asked, of course),
is the vulnerability, the humor, the fact that it was all fallible and that made it very inclusive and open to the point where even folks like myself sang.
but that, is the plight of what i like in writing, the home-spun truth that notes the quirky too.
congrats!

Kate

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Alright Reza! That was a good review. Maybe there can be a review next time we play in public. I don't like the opening "It is a long way from the deserts of Iran to the rain-swept streets of Liverpool, England" which shows we are totally misjudged but that was made up later on with praises of your performance.
Al
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I totall agree with Al -- told Steve already that 2/3 of Iran is desert and in fact the coast of Caspian is lush green and even in Tehran it snows...

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other comments about the concert:

thank you for the wonderful music. it was a great event........

Your voice is very good - really nice.

I am still dazzled by you remembering all the music and songs that you played. You have quite an encyclopedic brain. Congratulations

Plenty of nice material and you pulled it off very well.  You did a very nice job.

It was a wonderful concert, we enjoed it very much, sorry that we had to leave early.

That was the most fun I had in a long time. I enjoyed it so much. And it was the right balance - starting with classical guitar put me in the right mood.

You pulled it off very well.