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Discography

Cymin Samawatie - Ketan Bhatti

Berlin-based group, Cyminology, founded by Cymin Samawatie in 2002, may be the only Western jazz ensemble performing ballads with lyrics in Farsi (Persian). Her quartet with Indian drummer Ketan Bhatti, French-born pianist Benedikt Jahnel and German bassist Ralf Schwarz performs a unique brand of intercultural chamber jazz – by turns poetic, sensual, melancholic, dynamic and pulsating – that takes its musical inspiration from the sounds and inflections of the Farsi language.

Cymin Samawatie is both the group's charismatic leader and writer of most of the material. Born to Iranian parents in Germany, she was raised bilingually and bi-culturally. She studied classical music in Hannover, focusing on percussion and piano, as well as jazz voice and composition in Berlin.

Cymin writes texts in Farsi (Persian) and sets them to her own music, often developed through improvising. She says: "Our music is somewhere in between jazz, world music and classical music and between cultures, Occident and Orient. It is never simply one thing or the other, but somehow all and none of them at once."

The group's widely acclaimed 2009 ECM debut, As Ney, included classic Persian verse by Rumi as well as 20th-century Iranian poetry. Jazz Journal praised "this (mostly) gently affecting excursion into Sufi-touched but definitely contemporary, cross-cultural chamber jazz".

On the group's third album, Phoenix, they were joined, for the first time on a recording project by Berlin Philharmonic violist Martin Stegner, who has been a frequent collaborator with Cyminology since 2011. The viola, the string instrument closest to the human voice, becomes a kind of second singer here, extending the sense of East/West dialogue in the music. This album was dedicated to the memory of Forough Farrokhzaad (1935-1967), the outspoken Iranian modernist poet and film director.
 

Ketan Bhatti has been an active musician since his earliest youth.

Born in New Delhi, India in 1981, he grew up in Bielefeld, Germany and began to play the piano at the age of seven years.

Already at the age of twelve Ketan Bhatti jobbed around as a cafe pianist and presented his own compositions and Beatles arrangements.

At the age of fourteen Ketan Bhatti toured Germany as a drummer for local Jazz and Hip Hop bands.

In 1998 Ketan Bhatti began to work as a producer and in 1999 he was a prize winner as a pianist in the youth competition Jugend Musiziert. In the same year he joined the African Reggae band True Khoisan and the Soul/HipHop- Band Star Eye. With Star Eye Ketan Bhatti played as support-band for greats like Black Eyed Peas and Gentleman, and as support-band of Seeed during the Cool & Deadly Tour in 2001.

In the same year Star Eye was the Live band of Sekoú during his cd release tour in 2001. In 2002 the Star Eye album 'Soulmelodics', produced by Ketan, was published. The German Rapper Curse made a guest appearance on this release.

Since 2002 Ketan Bhatti has been studying Jazz drums at the Universität der Künste in Berlin with teachers like David Friedman, Peter Weniger , Joe Baron and John Hollenbeck.

In 2004 Ketan Bhatti's solo album 'Masala' was published on which he played most of the instruments and displayed his love for Trip Hop.

In 2004 Ketan joined Cyminology, which was to determine the course of the coming years. They toured all over the world an their third cd 'As Ney' was released by ECM in January 2009.

In 2006 Ketan Bhatti, together with his brother Vivan Bhatti, produced the music for Nuran Calis' play Homestories at the Schauspielhaus Essen, which was subsequently awarded a prize by the German president, and for Nuran Calis' production of Schiller's Die Räuber at the Volkstheater in Vienna, which later received the Nestroy Prize.

The year 2007 was the year in which Ketan Bhatti founded his own small studio in Berlin. Apart from many small productions, Ketan worked on Liebe, the follow up project to Homestories, at the Schauspielhaus Essen.

Since 2008 Ketan Bhatti has been working with his band Formelwesen on their debut album together with guitarist and producer Frank Möbus. Formelwesen was recipient of the award in the form of Popcamp of the Gerrman Council for Music.

As a result of his final qualification concert at the University in January 2008, Ketan Bhatti received the Karl Hofer Jazz Prize of the Universität der Künste in order to enable him to pursue his vision of an acoustic-electronic sound- composition.

In Autumn 2008 the play Einer von Uns by Nuran Calis was produced in Hamburg's Thalia Theatre for which Ketan composed the music together with his brother Vivan again.