Home » Jazz Musicians » Fariborz Lachini

Fariborz Lachini

Fariborz Lachini has been creating music for more than three decades. While in his twenties and just before the revolution, Lachini had already achieved success in the world of pop music, creating music for some of today's Persian pop icons as well as music for children. Most kinds of music were banned in Iran after the revolution, so Lachini moved to France to study music and computers.

Living in Europe and studying at "Universite de Paris - Sorbonne" added a European flavor to Lachini’s music and influenced his style to become a distinctive and beautiful fusion of contemporary Persian and European styles. He also mastered the technology to create exotic sampled Middle Eastern instruments, immediately putting him in a unique position when he entered the world of film music. The score for the Berlin Special Mention winner, Snake's Fang (1991), is an example of this. Variety comments: "...The exceptional music is a computerized version of traditional southern Iranian percussion. Soundtrack sets the pace and signals both danger and action throughout the film."

Lachini released his first solo piano album, Golden Autumn, in the early nineties. Crossing all of barriers with this music, the album quickly became the most popular album in Iran. It made Lachini’s a household name and he became known as the godfather of Iran's contemporary piano. A track from Golden Autumn 1 is now featured on iTunes Essentials - Classical World compilation, showing Lachini to be one of the few non-Western artists who contributed to classical music.

Fariborz Lachini has scored more than a hundred motion picture projects. He is recognized as one of the most innovative composing talents in the Middle-East and has scored for internationally-acclaimed Iranian filmmakers. One of his most recent works is Iraq's choice for Oscars 2006, Requiem of Snow: Variety wrote of the soundtrack: "...Fariborz Lachini's mournful acoustic music leaves a haunting aural residue in pic's wake."

As more and more artistic Iranian films are being featured in festivals around the globe, Fariborz Lachini’s reputation grows as a leading composer of memorable heartfelt melodies and cinematic musical themes, breaking down cultural borders.


Tags

Redefining minimalism

The one and only thing that bothers me about the music of Lachini is that I didn't find it sooner. I was first introduced to it in early 2008, and the quality and overall synthesis of the pieces blew my mind. And as I did more research about Lachini, his background and his music, the more interested I became. Put simply, these are pieces that are hard to believe are being written today. They're that ahead of their time.

Comparisons to contemporaries happen-as they often do-when it comes to trying to explain Lachini's music to those who are uninitiated. But it seems like the right adjectives aren't always there. Either way, it needs to be said: Steve Reich and Thomas Newman really have nothing on Fariborz Lachini when it comes to mindful reductivism in classical music. Although both composers do what they do very well, the frequent comparisons to Lachini's compositions aren't really the most accurate ones. True, both Reich and Newman fall along the lines of creating soundscapes for a new wave world. But minimalism, a benign enough term that's often been used to describe Lachini's compositions, is also a name that doesn't go far enough when talking about his music. Lachini, who is known and revered for his film compositions (and of course, the rest of his extensive body of work) for decades like Newman, stands alone with a gift for creating compositions that are so emotionally searing that it's easy to be curious about their sources. And while Lachini's compositions are vivacious, it's also obvious that they would easily succeed in every era-their origins even seem mysterious, as though the compositions were just discovered as sheet music in a tucked-away vault somewhere and had just been given new life.

Read more

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Requiem

Lachini Media
2008

buy

Videos

Similar

Philip Glass
composer / conductor

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.