Sayat Nova

Sayat-Nova is the original title for the 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. Along with some edits, the new name made the film acceptable to the Soviet State Committee for Cinematography’s Script Editorial board.

The film was made by Sergei Parajanov, born in the Georgian SSR to Armenian parents. The subject for the film is Sayat-Nova, an Armenian poet and troubadour born in the same Georgian city, but in the 1700s.

Sayat-Nova’s music and poetry brought him to the royal court of Heraclius II, but his love of that king’s sister led to his departure, to a life as an itinerant bard and later as a priest in the Armenian Apostolic Church. His work is a pillar of Armenian poetry and music to this day.

Parajanov illustrates Sayat-Nova’s life not with traditional narrative or dialog, but as a series of moving tableaux, with colors and compositions so beautiful that this relatively obscure film is considered one of the world's greatest films.

For this show, I've left a few of the original sounds, but in general I treat it as a canvas. I found it hard to imagine this world with either keyboard or guitar. Instead, I began to experiment with a rough-but-serviceable ngoni I had picked up a few years back. In Modern Robot fashion, the experiment turned into a repertoire, and that became my instrument for this show. It's a different continent, but it just sounded right. Arora Echo joins the show on drums.

If you've had a film conversation with me at some point, you may know my one steadfast and hard-line opinion — I hate biopics. I think the premise of a biopic, which is to turn the complicated and ambiguous reality of an influential person into a tidy, heartfelt plot undermines both documentary and narrative intents. I plan to never see another biopic again. To that, I add one exception — Sayat-Nova.