TALES OF NAR

New album coming early 2026 on the PeeWee label!

Yvlin violin

Benjamin Moussay piano

Keyvan Chemirani zarb, saz, percussion, co-composition

Bijan Chemirani zarb, santour, percussion, co-composition

The two sons of master Djamchid Chemirani embody both a prestigious lineage of Persian classical music and a uniquely French passion for weaving together diverse traditions. The rhythms they explore are at once ancient and new, deeply rooted yet postmodern, venturing into jazz, pop, Breton music, and high-level improvisation.

In 2022, Keyvan Chemirani composed a bold opera for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Negar, telling a sapphic love story set in the Iran of the mullahs. During this project, he met an extraordinary Japanese violinist in the German orchestra, Yvlin, whose playing shows “an unprecedented openness to Oriental modality combined with the full rigor of Western classical practice,” as Keyvan describes. He also recalled pianist Benjamin Moussay, with whom he had worked a decade earlier in clarinetist Louis Sclavis’s quartet — “a boundary-free musician; he loves pop, he loves Bach.”

Their first residency at Abbaye de Royaumont produced an unexpected result: the duo found themselves delightfully happy as a quartet. The project thus took shape under the name Tales of Nar – Tales of New Ancient Rhythms.

Tales of Nar brings together compositions from Bijan Chemirani, who, as Keyvan notes, possesses “an incredible ability to write themes that are simple, beautiful, effective, and deeply inspiring.” “I write things more arranged, more considered, longer,” adds Keyvan. “And Benjamin composed La Cena Grande, which reflects both of us.”

Without representing a specific people or place, without being tied to any particular time, the music of Tales of Nar participates in a larger movement of the world — one that challenges those who cling to static identities, here as anywhere across the seas. In the Tout-Monde imagined by Édouard Glissant, every human can potentially connect with any other, on a planet with no terra incognita, where cultural objects circulate freely despite languages, borders, censorship, or fatwas. This album lets us hear the music of that world.

Perhaps this is why Keyvan allows himself “the feeling that what we play makes sense, that we can share it through this album and in concert. When one is affected as I am by the world of this moment, the greatest reward is feeling such communion from the stage — between musicians, and with the audience. I don’t know what to call it: a breath of oxygen, a lifebuoy…” A true tale, perhaps.