With Iranian culture and diaspora much in the news, it was a good time to hear Bay Area tenor saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh (right) in a collaboration with New York-based Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar (left), last Friday at Alwan for the Arts. (Note: photo is from an earlier gig, elsewhere.) The two have developed an extraordinary language that draws on Iraqi maqam and Persian dastgah traditions, with legato cries, subtle overtones and dissonance, and precise but exceedingly odd bursts of unison and harmonized line playing. Though they’re clearly indebted to the harmonically open quartet model of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, Hafez and Amir execute lines steeped in nonwestern microtonality — they don’t sound anything like the freebop gestures to which we’ve grown accustomed. Amir’s horn, fitted with a special finger slide, enables him to access a broader range of notes.
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