September 23, 2022
When Aida Shahghasemi’s family moved from Iran to Minnesota, it was more traumatic for the 13-year-old than it was liberating. She always thought that one day she would move back home for good.
But as a female singer-songwriter, she gradually realized that she would be giving up too much in Iran: She never would be allowed to perform solo. So, the 35-year-old musician stayed put in America.
“The political, economic, and social status of Iran was always a deterrent,” Shahghasemi told the Sahan Journal, a publication for Minnesota’s immigrant community. “I was able to spend a lot of time there, but I realized that because I had never lived there as an adult, I would probably struggle quite a bit.”
In August, Shahghasemi released her third solo album, “Event Vista.” The album tells stories about her personal losses, including deaths, the anticipation of loss, and the current state of Iran’s society, politics and economics.
Her lyrics are almost all sung in Farsi and intertwine Persian poetry, a common influence in traditional Persian music, to provide the rhythmic structure for Shahghasemi’s album.
Shahghasemi discovered her passion for music as a child in Tehran. Some of her fondest memories include listening to Persian pop artist Hayedeh with her mother, and listening to classical Persian music with her father. Jazz and prolific Western artists like Nat King Cole and Aretha Franklin also began to shape her musical tastes and style.
The youngest of three siblings, music was an essential part of her upbringing in the mid-1980s, despite attitudes in Iran about music at the time. The country was in the middle of a war with neighboring Iraq, and Shahghasemi said simply carrying an instrument in the streets was frowned upon.
“Music was very much looked down upon as a Western hobby,” Shahghasemi said, adding that many people at the time believed “you have better things to do in life than playing music.”
She began violin lessons at age 8, but eventually lost interest. What rekindled her musical aspirations was a Persian classical concert where she discovered the daf, a large Kurdish frame drum often covered with either goat or synthetic skin. The unique row of chains around the rim of the daf distinguishes this wooden frame drum from others and the sound immediately caught Shahghasemi’s attention.
But finding an instructor who would teach her proved to be a challenge.
“It was big, I was little, and my hands may not be able to handle it,” Shahghasemi said.
Eventually she found Amir Samadi, who has played with prominent Iranian artists including the vocalist Parisa and kamancheh player Ali Akbar Shekarchi. Samadi taught her the daf–and much more.
“Music was just one medium, and I think through him I learned that it’s all about exploration and curiosity. We talked about poetry. We talked about Persian carpets. It was from that point on that it became a significant part of my life,” she said.
By her early teenage years, she was regularly playing shows in Tehran while also teaching herself to sing and play the piano. But in the summer of 2000, her family made the decision to relocate to Minneapolis in order to provide educational opportunities for Shahghasemi and her two sisters.
Her father stayed behind and continued teaching at a university in Tehran while also running a business. The transition was difficult for 13-year-old Shahghasemi.
“Immigrating was really traumatic for me,” she said.
The new environment and attending a mixed-gender school were cultural shocks.
“My peers were not very nice when I began going to school,” Shahghasemi said. “I was one of the very few students of color in my school, and I felt it.”
The then-16-year-old saved money to buy her own plane ticket home, spending her summer playing the daf in a percussion band and seeing family and friends. For the next few years, she continued to work, save money, and spend her summers in Iran with plans to move back after earning her college degree.
It became increasingly clear to Shahghasemi that moving back to Iran would restrict her life as a musician. She would have only two options for singing in public: sing to an all-female audience only, or work as a male vocalist’s back-up singer performing to a mixed-gendered audience
Those limitations are misinterpretations of Islamic law, she said, adding that it doesn’t “say women’s voices are bad or their voices shouldn’t be listened to, but the way that it has been translated socially is women’s voices are enticing and arousing in ways that distract one from being on the pure path of Islam.”
In 2015, she recorded her first solo album, “Wind Between the Horse’s Ears,” and followed that in 2019 with “Cypress of Abarkooh.”
Her latest album, “Event Vista,” is influenced by Persian classical music and includes contributing musicians from all over the globe on cello, guitar, saxophone, percussion and other instruments. Shahghasemi provided the lyrics, some instrumentation and rhythmic foundation, and the collaborating artists added their own unique contributions to the songs.
Shahghasemi said the album was shaped by the idea of black holes, where no light can escape and from which there is no point of return. There is a connection between that and the current state of affairs in Iran, she said.
The album’s name makes reference to the corruption Shahghasemi said she sees in Iran’s politics, and the feeling of a current pulling people inevitably into darkness. A drumbeat of bad news encourages people to “behave the same way, grab hold of anything you can in order to survive every day, and not realize that you are siding with the enemy,” she said.
“When you’ve been groomed into wrongdoing, you no longer know you are doing wrong,” Shahghasemi said. “The level of corruption happening right now may appear blasphemous and unacceptable to an outsider. But for the politicians who are in it, they seem to accept it little by little to the point where 40 years after the [1979 Iran] revolution, they are completely unmoved that people’s lives are at stake on a daily basis in Iran.
“It’s the anticipation of loss of sanity in a way–where you no longer are able to tell right from wrong and groomed to destroy. ‘Event Vista’ stands for falling into the abyss of darkness or nothingness and slowly being sucked into it not knowing once you’re in it.”
Shahghasemi returned to graduate school in 2020 and completed a master’s in counseling therapy at the University of St. Thomas. She now works as an independent contractor mental health therapist. She incorporates art into her work as a way to connect with clients.
Although she works full-time, she plans to continue making and performing music independently, adding that music is “an outlet for me to say what I want to say and express it the way I want to express it.”
“For me, music is the epitome of human expression,” she said. “It’s the best way to express a human experience. It’s very unifying. People all across the globe can connect with it in some way.”