INTERVIEW: Vahagni charts life, death of great matador on new EP
Photo: Vahagni’s new EP is called The Life & Death of a Great Matador. Photo courtesy of Martin Yernazyan / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Vahagni, a guitarist born in Armenia and raised in Los Angeles, has been around music for most of his life. The arts were important to his parents and his extended family when he was growing up, and this instilled in him an appreciation and eventual mastery of the guitar.
Vahagni puts those guitar skills to great use on his new EP, entitled The Life & Death of a Great Matador, which celebrates and mourns the musician’s late father, a tremendous influence in his life.
“I wanted to put out more music that was not an album,” Vahagni said in a recent phone interview. “I just had a bunch of ideas that fit a certain sound, and so I started just compiling three pieces and just recorded them and just wanted them to be put out, as is, without really putting out a full album. … It’s [also] an homage to my father, who passed away about three years ago in 2016, and he was my teacher, my mentor, in a sense. He was a professional guitarist and soloist for the National Philharmonic [Orchestra] back in Armenia where we’re from, so when he passed away, it was my way of paying tribute. So I wanted to create something that was my way of expressing emotion.”
Joining the main track, “The Life & Death of a Great Matador,” are two other compositions: “Interlude” and “Sunday.” By listening to all three, one can peer into the personality and mindset of Vahagni. The style is influenced by flamenco, and the accompanying music video features flamenco dancer Manuel Gutiérrez, who wears a bloodied bullfighter’s jacket designed by Domingo Zapata.
While watching the video and listening to Vahagni’s songs, it becomes clear that his father was a man who left his imprint on the world and, in particular, his son. Sarkis Turgutyan, according to press notes, was the first-ever guitar soloist for the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Armenia, and he too was interested in the power and possibility of flamenco-infused music.
“I’m an artist, so I think I naturally have to get things out within the world artistically,” said Vahagni, who was born Vahagn Turgutyan. “But more than anything, I wanted to pay tribute to somebody who was not just my father, but somebody who was just very special to me as a musician and a mentor, a big part of why I am who I am.”
The Life & Death of a Great Matador, which the singer is expected to play at two Art Basel shows in December, is founded in flamenco generally and the style of cante jondo specifically. This style deals with more serious subject matter.
“It’s not a form where you sing about happiness,” he said. “It’s kind of equivalent to the blues in flamenco, so that’s the root of it. The rhythmic aspect of it and the feeling and the way I’m playing guitar is very much based on that, that kind of specific form in flamenco, but what I wanted to do is I wanted to showcase how I feel about making music these days. I just feel like it’s OK to superimpose something very new and fresh on top of something that is very old and has a lot of culture and serious roots, in a sense, so that’s why I did all the production myself.”
Being a Renaissance man in the world of music is important to Vahagni. He loves playing the guitar, but that is only one facet of his career and passions. He is also a composer and producer, and he brought all of these talents to bear on these three tunes.
“I just wanted these three tracks to be cohesive where they all have this electronica sound design aspect to it, but they’re all emotionally related in a sense,” Vahagni said. “The first part is the celebratory part, celebrating someone’s life. The second part was the mourning process, which I arranged my four voices for this Armenian woodwind instrument called the duduk, and I just layered that and had this pulse that represents that rhythm. And I just wanted it to be completely empty, just a lot of space, and then going into the other tune, ‘Interlude,’ which is exactly what it is. It’s this elongated gesture of slowing down time.”
For “Interlude,” he wanted to slow down a single snapshot, which sometimes can last for only a second, and see if he could stretch it out, make it elastic, find the feeling. Methodically, the track becomes an extended gesture.
“Then finally ‘Sunday’ was the end process, the end of the week in a sense, where the sun keeps rising at the end of the day, no matter what,” Vahagni said. “It starts off kind of slow, and it goes into a happy place where it’s that moving-forward vibe. So there’s definitely a conceptual aspect to [the EP].”
This musical introspection didn’t come overnight for the guitarist. Thanks to his father (professional guitarist), mother (theater actor) and uncle (ethnomusicologist and composer), he has been ensconced in this world for some time.
“Since I could remember, I was going to be a guitarist,” he said proudly. “There was no other plan. … I just grew up in a very artistic family where it was always around me. When we moved to Los Angeles, that’s when I started taking things seriously. I was 6 when we moved here, but I was about 8 or 9 when my father started being really, really strict about giving me lessons, making me practice no matter what. And then in my teens I started wanting to explore more than classical guitar repertoire and flamenco. So I got into jazz, and I got into all kinds of music from electronica music to classical avant-garde music to jazz to sound design to you name it, because I grew up in L.A. So I was constantly surrounded by different types of music, different kinds of cultural expressions and things like that, so that definitely shaped who I am.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Vahagni’s new EP is called The Life & Death of a Great Matador. Click here for more information.
