I studied Chinese at university, and later, jazz guitar and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA.  After returning to the UK and finding it hard to find my place in the jazz world of London, I returned to China to write film music and to teach jazz guitar to Chinese students at the Beijing Institute for Contemporary Music Research.

Uyghur music traditions

It was there that I met Uyghur musicians from the northwest of the country, and helped found Panjir, a well-known world music group that combined jazz and Uyghur music.  I left Beijing to study Uyghur music more formally in Urumqi, the capital city of the region, and undertook a traditional apprenticeship with a leading tambur player of the State Orchestra for six months, (to the best of my knowledge) the first foreigner ever to do so.  It was an extraordinary time of learning, and of seeing first hand the pressures placed on China’s ethnic minorities by the racism of Chinese authorities.

A massive authoritarian crackdown and cultural genocide perpetrated by the Chinese government on Uyghurs and other turkic peoples meant that Panjir had to stop playing, and I had to leave China.  The music I had learned became more important not only as an extraordinarily beautiful and complex way to create music, but also as a means of resistance.

Iranian Dastgah music

During the covid pandemic, I was given an Iranian setar, and started to learn Iranian dastgah music – in reality the source material for much of the music of the Uyghurs, and a central inspiration for much of the music of Central and South Asia.  After intensive study with Nima Janmohammadi, a virtuoso of the setar and a professor of composition at New England Conservatory in Boston, I started to integrate the frames of Iranian and Uyghur music into my guitar playing – learning to be more deliberate about the musical choices I make and the way that I shape improvisations and compositions over time.

Music remains for me one of the most important tools for resisting the destruction of culture and the oppression of people.  For Iranians, Uyghurs, and many others, music remains definitely free – I aim to do my part to spread knowledge of the music to the outside world to help ensure that it can never be eradicated or lost.

The sound of thousands of years of ingenuity

At the same time, these musical forms keep us in touch with the oldest traditions in Eurasian music, with a lineage dating back to the birth of civilization. Demanding on the musician, and transcendentally beautiful to listen to, these forms of music are instinctively familiar to audiences and provide an antidote to a western musical culture that is increasingly dependent on technology and density of sound – it’s just the sound of acoustic instruments in resonance; the sound of human creativity in the face of oppression; and the sound of thousands of years of ingenuity and experience.