Armenia Dispatch: 11 – More Bambir

by Erik Olsen on

We left the market and headed to the house of the record producer I was talking about the other day. There, I met up with the guys from the band Bambir to talk to them about the rock scene and shot them playing and rehearsing.

We all gathered in the rather dark and cramped space, and the guys set up their instruments as we chatted. Bambir comes from Gyumri, the city where the 1985 earthquakehit the hardest. But as they told me, Gyumri is the city of humor, and so despite that tragedy, people who come from there are funny and warm. This was true in their case. All the guys, Narek (the lead singer and guitarist), Arik (the flautist), and Arman (the bassist) were upbeat, funny guys. (btw: the photo here is of Narek performing recently). They smoked and cracked jokes and were overall hilarious, cool guys. Their drummer, Ashot, was supposedly working at the local CD shop, and so couldn’t make it. We later learned this wasn’t true, that we was hanging out at home…I guess that’s rockers for you.

So the guys got their instruments set up and then started to play, and I’ll tell you, they were great. Really. Even in the cramped little room, that banged out some excellent songs. Narek played guitar and crooned like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Arik blew on the flute with great skill. These guys are the real deal. Real rockers from this little country in the Caucuses.Real musicians.

I asked Arik if he knew any Beatles on the flute, and he immediately launched into a cool little riff on Norwegian Wood, which Narek picked up on, and soon they were jamming on one of my favorite Beatles tunes of all time. These guys are great. I’ll try to post some of the stuff I shot when I get back to the states, but in the meantime, you ought to check them out. I’ll ask their producer if I can post a song or two, and you can download it to hear them. Side note about the band: They were voted Armenia’s best rock band like three years in a row (I’ll have to confirm this, but suffice to say, they are popular here…even if they’re not yet making enough dough to stop working at the CD shop…which makes for such a great story!). Tomorrow, I am going to catch them in concert, so I’ll tell you how good they are as performers, but my guess is they’re excellent.

So I wanted to shoot the Bambir guys walking around the city and so we took a stroll around Yerevan and I talked to the band and we did some shooting around the Parliament building and then around some of the old parts of the city. We ended up sitting and chatting a shooting next to a huge hole (and I mean huge) where they are building a new street here in Yerevan. I thought it was a cool spot to illustrate how much the city is changing. Anyway, we then stopped and had a couple of beers and I had to move onto my next project at the chess academy. But the shoot and the hanging with the Bambir guys went well, and so far the day was off to a good start.

Next dispatch coming up later….

Armenia Dispatch: 10 – Varnissage Market

by Erik Olsen on

Man I had an unrelenting day yesterday. Exhausting. But it was immensely interesting, and very productive. I would have written this last night but I was simply too wiped out to sit down and get it done, so I crashed instead and got the first night of solid sleep in a while. I’m going to break the day into a couple of dispatches, so here’s the first.

It was a working day for me, trying to get together interviews and doing a bunch of shooting for a couple of travel projects I’m working on. In the morning, after a cup of strong, thick, gravy-like Armenian coffee, I headed with an Armenian-American friend named Dork to the local outdoor market called the Vernissage, which only taken place in full force on the weekends. The days so far here in Yerevan have been beautiful. About 75-80 degrees, perfect sunshine, and yesterday was no exception. And so we strolled around the market, looking at all manner of crafts and junk that people sell there. I was shooting pictures, and really enjoying the vibe of the market. This place is an undiscovered gold-mine for E-bay sellers. There are all sorts of things being sold here from old auto-parts and machine parts to lovely hand-made table cloths and blankets. Every cool foreign place I’ve ever been in the world has a thriving local market where all the people come and sell things. Markets are the best place, oftentimes, to see what the people are about, to savor the culture of a place through the work and products people put on display. The Vernissage market is where that happens in Yerevan. While it may happen soon as Armenia, and Yerevan specifically, get more popular (and I’ve telling you, this place IS getting popular, and will be very different in five years) the stuff sold at the market is not yet the kind of tourist crap you find on some other city markets. And that’s very cool, I think. Anyway, I’ll post a picture of the market and you can get an idea of what it’s like. I bought a couple of nice hand-made table cloths which I’ll probably give out at gifts.

Armenia Dispatch: 9 Bambir

by Erik Olsen on

Well, it’s after 2 am and I am beat. These nights blaze by. I ended up tonight with a large group of local Armenians and some Diasporans at a restaurant high above the city in an area called the Cascade. The Cascade is this monstrous Soviet-looking cement staircase that goes on and on. And while I feel compelled to say it is ugly, like a lot of the places and monuments here…there is an extremely cool kind of retro, kitschiness to it that I really liked. They’re now building big flower beds around and in it, and there are fountains and they are sprucing it up, and I have to say, it is a very cool part of town. And of course, doing shots of vodka and gazing over much of Yerevan was also exhilarating and helped my mood immensely.

This morning, I took a long walk around the city today with a couple of friends, two Armenian American brothers who also happen to be visiting at this time and whom I’ve known for a long long time. Each of them has lived here before, and so it was nice to get their perspective on how much things have changed here. Things have changed a lot. Ten years ago, they explained, a blockade of Armenia by Azerbaijan left the country without fuel for much of the year, so the city was often in a near permanent black-out state at night and heating one’s home was pretty much impossible. The residents in the city and the countryside suffered terribly. And yet they held things together, built or rebuilt, and today you would never have guessed that it was so bad back then. The square where my hotel sits is this elegant, beautifully lit square where a large, stadium TV sits now, showing ads at all hours. People are out walking and coming home from a night on the town. Ten years ago, at this time of night, it was a gaping black space. Amazing.

Early afternoon, I went with one of my friends to the office of a record producer who works with an Armenian band called Bambir. This is another story I’m working on…the whole Armenian rock scene. And so he was a great connection. I spent most of the morning at his office, which was on the other side of town in a kind of grungy, but happening, space. There was recording equipment and instruments were strewn everywhere. A Jimmy Hendrix poster on the wall. CDs scattered across the desk. He is an older guy, but does a lot of work with up and coming groups. It was interesting to hear him talk about the old Soviet days when, he said, the one thing that made them happy, that gave him hope, was rock and roll. How cool is that?? I’m heading (hopefully) to a Bambir concert this week.

Anyway, we talked a bit about the popularity of rock here, how the scene is exploding with all sorts of bands making names for themselves. One band in particular, while not formally from Armenia, but of Armenian heritage, is called System of the Down and they’re making a big splash in the states and here as well. Bambir is kind of like a young Jethro Tull. They come from a city called Gyumri (sp?) where the earthquake hit the country hardest, and while they were pretty young when it happened, they write about this in some of their songs (in fact, I think their first album was called Quake…though I’ll have to confirm that). I got their recent CD and ripped it into my Powerbook. quite liked it. Eager to hear the concert soon.

So it’s late now and I’m hitting the sack. More from Yerevan and the Armenian hinterlands coming soon.

Armenia Dispatch: 8 Chess Power

by Erik Olsen on

I am playing a little bit of catch-up here since I didn’t much cover part of the day yesterday. I hooked up in the late afternoon with a great guy named Aram, an American Armenian who is involved in the local chess scene. This is a story I am hoping to do while I’m here because almost everyone I talked with about Armenia before coming told me what a big deal chess is here.

Now, I love chess. But I’m about as “recreational” a player as they get. Every so often I’ll have an inspired game and do something I’m proud of, but most of the time I muddle through as a rather poor intermediate player…the kind of guy good chess players eat for breakfast. So I thought that in addition to doing a little reporting, it might be fun to come here and try to scare up a game. The problem is, I would get whooped here by 8 year olds.

So as a side hobby (he holds a PhD in bio-mechanics from Harvard) Aram works in Yerevan with the Armenian Chess Academy, which not only holds chess tournaments here and there, but also helps teach young people how to play. The federation was located in a non-descript building a few blocks away from the Marriott, where I am staying. I met up with Aram there as well as with a very intense-looking dude named Smbat Lputyan, who, it turns out, is a Grand Master chess player (Aram explained the ranking system to me…that is, how someone reaches Grand Master status, but it’s too complicated to explain here). Suffice it to say, Smbat is the kind of guy who could probably beat me in chess in three moves or less while watching TV, talking on the phone and juggling.

I chatted with Aram for a while and learned a great deal about Armenian domination in chess. As he put it, when people discuss small countries like Armenia, they are accustomed to saying things like “per capita, Armenia has more grand masters than most other countries…” but for Armenia, he says, you can dump “per capita”. He then opened me the fide web site showing how many Armenians are in the big time, chess-wise. It’s very impressive. The Russians are big players, too, as you might have guessed (although probably the biggest name in chess, Gary Kasparov, who is Russian, was actually born of an Armenian mother. So there you go.)

Anyway, I hung out at the chess academy for a while, and learned a great deal about chess and Armenia’s unusual strength in the sport. There were a few kids in the academy’s training rooms, sitting behind chess pieces and looking at them very intently, notebooks open next to them so they could log their moves. I had a momentary impulse to ask for a game, but then decided against it. It would ruin my ego to be destroyed by someone under ten.

I am going to head to a competition tomorrow (Sat) to check it out, in fact, look forward to watching some of the best kids in the world play each other as I look on.

Armenia Dispatch: 5: Sevan and Khor Virap

by Erik Olsen on

Just a quick note picking up from yesterday…after we left Geghard we headed for Lake Sevan where we climbed a squat hill to the two monasteries there. The view from up there was magnificent, and the whole blue lake was spread out before us. The weather has been ideal, about 75 degrees, with a bright yellow sun and blue skies, and I could have sat there on a bench watching the fishermen on the lake for hours. It was peaceful and beautiful, about as much as you can ask for a place to deliver.

We ate lunch at a restaurant near the lake and enjoyed raw vegetables and lavash bread (becoming a favorite of mine), and then platefuls of freshly caught lake Seven fish. We drank some Erebunie beers (also superb) and enjoyed the fish and vegetables and lavash bread with a delicious yoghurt sauce and the whole scene pretty much kicked ass.

We then drove back to Yerevan and headed out to the monastery at Khor Virap, which is out in the countryside and sits (in most pictures anyway) in front of the looming face of Mount Ararat. It was too bright and hazy to see Ararat very well, but I climbed a hill overlooking the monastery and a cemetary and took a panoramic photo, which I will put together and show in the future.

Khor Virap was very cool, though, and rich in history, as it is said this is where St. Gregory the Illuminator, who brought Christianity to Armenia so long ago, was imprisoned.

So, heading out now into the city. More later.