MEHDI FARZANE A.K.A ARASH

Mehdi Farzane received                              's biography

My name is Arash and I was born in Isfahan which is one of the metropolitan cities in Iran. I was born during the Iran / Iraq war. My father was a pilot and served in the army. Evidently, discipline and order were very important in our household. He died when I was six and after he passed away our family was stuck in a very strange dilemma. Both family and friends paid a lot of attention to us and we were also supposed to get used to this new lifestyle. I was a kid but I was faced with something that didn’t even exist in a child’s world. After a while, I understood that I should plan a future that didn’t include a father in it. The death of my father created an unwanted but deep union between the members of my family which included my mother, sister, and brothers. During secondary school, I started to be interested in arts, but still, I haven’t made a serious decision on studying it. In my first year of high school though I seriously decided to study music and of course it was faced with my family’s disagreement. This turned to be my first challenge attempting my way into the art world. But I managed to convince them somewhat and buy my first guitar. Three years after I entered the Music Conservatory of Tehran and graduate after four years. When I entered the conservatory, I was very much into rock, blues, and funk, after the conservatory classical music was added to the list. I was always expected or asked why I don’t play Iranian instruments or why I don’t use Iranian music structures in my music compositions. I was always told that this would be a symbol of my nationality, but to be honest, I have never wanted to do that, I have never had any interest in playing Iranian instruments. It seems nationality is an element that is always somewhat of importance to everyone but it doesn’t seem to play a role in my work. I continued playing bass guitar and composing songs with different bands in Tehran and currently, I am studying jazz and American twenty-century music in Turkish in Istanbul. It's a quite funny mixture of learning New Orleans and Chicago’s Jazz music In Turkish in Istanbul and analyzing it in my head in Farsi. Even though national symbols don’t play a role in my music, I believe geographical status makes a big difference in how you perceive your
surroundings and translate them into your work.