BADIEH ft. NASIM KUSHNAWAZ

Badieh was born from the musical collaboration between Michel Gasco (Salamanca, Spain) and Mohammad Miraghazadeh (Mashhad, Iran). The two musicians share a deep passion for the music of Khorasan, a geographical and historical region that encompasses northeastern Iran, western Afghanistan, and parts of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

Michel Gasco and Mohammad Miraghazadeh worked together to develop a repertoire of music from both sides of the Iran-Afghanistan border. They formed a trio with Afghan tabla player Ramin Ahmadi. Badieh released two albums on the Australian label Worlds Within Worlds, both of which received excellent reviews from specialized media such as Songlines. On both albums, they collaborated with some of the finest Iranian and Afghan musicians from Mashhad, Iran, including Afghan music masters Nasim Khushnawaz and Jawad Tabesh, as well as Iranian musicians Ehsan Nasibi and Yohanna Alavi.

For the concert at De Centrale, Badieh will be joined by Afghan rebab player Nasim Khushnawaz.

As a master of the Afghan rebab, Nasim Khushnawaz comes from one of the most important musical families in Afghanistan. He is the son of Ustad Rahim Khushnawaz, a renowned rebab maestro from Herat. Nasim lives in exile in Iran, where he continues the tradition of four generations by performing Afghan, Khorasani, and Herati music. Nasim's prestige extends beyond his music. His father, Ustad Rahim, played a crucial role in introducing the rebab to Western audiences when ethnomusicologist John Baily recorded and shared his album Rubab of Herat in the 1970s. Nasim's first internationally released album, Songs from the Pearl of Khorasan, produced by Michel Gasco, was recognized by Songlines Magazine in 2022 as one of the 10 best new albums in the world.