“Ithought, ‘Oh, lullabies are soothing melodies and they have a rhythm,’” says singer Azam Ali, “‘and you sing to [children] and they fall asleep.’”
The former Glendale resident’s perception of lullabies changed once her son, Iman, was born in January 2008. His birth inspired “From Night to the Edge of Day,” a melancholy yet transcendent collection of lullabies from across the Middle East. Born in Iran and raised in India before immigrating as a teen with her mother to Los Angeles, Ali had never contemplated recording lullabies on her own or with Niyaz, the critically acclaimed global-fusion trio she performed in with husband Loga Ramin Torkjan and Carmen Rizzo.
“I was so overwhelmed [at the hospital] when they brought Iman and left him with me,” she recalls. “I stayed up all night, just staring at him. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even talk to him. So I just started to sing. [‘Tenderness] was the first melody that came, and I think I sang it for about two hours, nonstop. That’s why I remembered it. My husband woke up and said, ‘I don’t know what you were singing to him, but it was lovely.’”
On the album, “Tenderness” reverberates with drones and Ali’s sorrowful vocals, beautiful even as it expresses profound loss.
“When Iman was born, I think more than any other time in my life I felt how far I was from my country,” she explains. “I felt extremely isolated and extremely sad. Suddenly, when he was there in front of me, I realized that he would never know the culture that I was born in. There would be a huge cultural gap between us. That made me reflect on all the children that are born in a diaspora, and that’s where the idea for the lullabies came: Why don’t I just take this energy, take this sadness, and do something positive with it?”
Working from her new home in Montreal, Ali focused on ethnic minority groups like the Kurds and Azeri, gradually understanding why lullaby lyrics are so dark.
“When you hold your child, the immense sense of responsibility you feel is such a mixture of fear and love that you want to protect them from everything in the world and at the same time realize that you’re not going to be able to. In many ways, when they’re that young the mother is kind of preparing the child for the world that they’re about to enter. It’s not always a kind place; it’s not always a good place.
“It was such a process of discovery … By the end it was such a personal journey for me as well, and very healing.”
09/22/11 >> 
