A youth in Soviet Armenia
Djivan Gasparyan was born on October 12, 1928 in Solak, a village located a few kilometers northeast of Yerevan, in Armenia under Soviet rule. From the age of 6, he studied the Duduk, a type of double hip oboe, an instrument with a sound of incredible beauty, depth and expressiveness. His childhood was painful: in 1941, his mother died and his father had to go to war. He plays in the street for a few pittances, in order to feed his sister, his brother and himself, he confided in 2019 to the British site SongLines : “I learned that the power of Duduk comes from the expression you put on it.”
In 1947, Djivan Gasparyan left for Moscow with an amateur ensemble. He soon receives a watch from Stalin after a concert, but, broke, he sells it. In 1949, he joined a national folk song and dance group of Armenia. He collected distinctions and quickly acquired great fame in his country.
International recognition came at the end of the 1980s, thanks to British artists. Brian Eno, famous musician and producer, invites Gasparyan to London after seeing him perform in Moscow. He reissued one of his albums released in 1983 ( Armenian Folk Tunes ) on his label under a new title, I Will Not Be Sad in This World .
The British singer Peter Gabriel, in full musical exploration at the time of writing the album Passion , the soundtrack to the film The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese, discovered his music and fell under the spell of the Armenian duduk. He will integrate this instrument into Passion and help make it known around the world.
Multiple international collaborations
Subsequently, Djivan Gasparyan continued international collaborations. He works with the Californian string quartet Kronos Quartet, the Turkish musician Erkan Oğur - for a strong symbol of fraternization -, the Iranian lutenist Hossein Alizadeh, the Pakistani legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but also with the Canadian composer Michael Brook for the Real World label by Peter Gabriel. In 2004, he notably participated in the soundtrack of the film Gladiator by Ridley Scott, in collaboration with composer Hans Zimmer. A fair return for the man who confided to SongLines that in his childhood, he listened with fascination, at the cinema, to the duduk players who accompanied silent films...
In 1996, Djivan Gasparyan performed alongside famous American singer Lionel Lionel for the song Now You're Gone .
