Harold Hagopian |
Traditional Crossroads is a ground-breaking Audiophile World Music Label
dedicated to releasing music of various cultures utilizing state-of the-art
recording technology and high-quality packaging. Traditional Crossroads
provides the most sophisticated record engineering and thorough liner notes
for every release, from the latest recordings of Cuban jazz to reissues of
turn-of-the-century middle-eastern legends. Remastered using computer
technology known as the CEDAR system, 1912 recordings of the chant-like music
of the Armenian composer Komitas Vartapet sound surprisingly clear and
haunting. As do the historical gramophone recordings from the 1920s collected
on Istanbul 1925, taken from the original metal parts, which were praised by
Rolling Stone as “having a sound clarity that makes it seem as if they had
arrived, magically, out of a time machine.”
Rolling Stone
remastered with a sound clarity that makes it seem as if they had arrived,
magically, out of a time machine.
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Founded in 1993 by Harold Hagopian, a classical record producer for RCA with a
passion for middle-eastern music, Traditional Crossroads has built a record
catalog of the best middle-eastern musicians, known or discovered. A graduate
of Juilliard in classical violin, son of the well-known ud virtuoso Richard
Hagopian, and a lead performer himself in the Armenian music world on violin
and clarinet, Harold uses his expertise in instrumental technique and ear for
middle-eastern composition to select musicians and create innovative
recordings. Traditional Crossroads’ first recording, The Art of Taksim,
featuring Turkish kanun (lap harp) virtuoso Göksel Kartal, won the award for
Best String Recording by the National Association of Record Distributors.
Gypsy Fire, a widely heralded belly dance album combining Turkish, Armenian
and Gypsy musicians, was nominated for a Grammy. Hagopian travelled to
Istanbul two years ago to produce a live recording of the Ottoman compositions
of Tatyos Efendi which he discovered in Turkish archives. The two-CD
compilation released features Kudsi Erguner and other renowned Turkish
musicians and was widely praised both here and in Turkey.
Billboard
Traditional Crossroads has a roster of hot, original and vintage sounds
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Recently, Harold
spent three weeks in Istanbul searching through archives and interviewing
surviving women cabaret singers from the 1920s. The resulting CD, Crossroads’
pride and joy, was released: Women of Istanbul, a collection of the greatest
female singers in Turkey in this century, with 40 pages of rare photos and
information on both the changing status of women in modern Turkey and the
history of the gramophone recording industry in Istanbul. “I use the same
state -of -the-art, digital technology to remaster early recordings of world
music ,” says Hagopian, “as I do to restore recordings of Caruso, Rubinstein,
or other western classical artists.” Traditional Crossroads’ high standard
recordings express the eclectic, insider interests of a musician born into a
unique diaspora middle-eastern musical circle--a community which over the
years has collected, treasured, and argued over every note, tone and
biographical detail of the best middle-eastern masters, largely inaccessible
to western audiences.
The Beat
A high watermark for archival engineering
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Traditional Crossroads’ best-known artists include Kayhan Kalhor (Scattering
Stars Like Dust), an Iranian kamancheh player, and Djivan Gasparyan, a master
on the 1500-year-old flute known as the duduk, an Armenian instrument carved
from the trunk of an apricot root. Gasparyan was introduced to the West when
Peter Gabriel and Tim Robbins used duduk soundtracks in The Last Temptation of
Christ and Dead Man Walking respectively. Traditional Crossroads has issued
Gasparyan’s definitive recordings, Ask Me No Questions and Apricots from Eden.
In the past two years Traditional Crossroads has also spread to the Ottoman
fringe and beyond, with recordings of the Bulgarian saxophonist Yuri Yunakov
(New Colors in Bulgarian Wedding Music), The Klezmatics’ Alicia Svigals
(Fidl’), the kora player Morikeba Kouyate (a member of a well-known griot
family from Senegal), an Irish reissue, and a collection of ensembles in Cuba
performing the music known as Changüí.
Georgia Straight, Canada
"Traditional Crossroads seems utterly devoted to getting
everything right!"