This is Mugham

Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Square, 28 January, 7.20pm

You've never heard music like this. Astonishment; visceral beauty. Witness to an unearthly magnificence. And it is from Azerbaijan.

It's on the first floor, the man behind the reception desk says, proffering our tickets. Up wide, grand stairs. A bright, spacious interior which could serve a Jane Austen television adaptation well. A middle-sized room, perhaps 40 or so chairs in rows facing a projector screen, a covered piano, a chair, and three stringed instruments. A man wields a heavy-looking camera in a corner.

I spot an old friend, a doctor who'd spent decades working in east London hospitals, and chairman of the UK's first Azerbaijani community centre, which opened in 2008 in Hackney. He's here tonight with a woman who works for the European Azerbaijan Society, an organisation dedicated to promoting Azerbaijani culture and greater cooperation between Azerbaijan and Europe. We sit.

In a few minutes Jeffrey Werbock appears. He's of middle height, greying hair, robust build. A rich, warm American voice explains that mugham is pronounced moo-gham, and that during this latest trip to the UK he'd performed at the School of Oriental and African Studies and in Oxford during recent days.

The projector screen clicks into life. Mr Werbock takes us on a brief Powerpoint tour of maqam or maqqam, an Arabic term (????), meaning a space, location - mugham in Azerbaijan. A world map shows an arc sweeping from North Africa to central Asia, down to Indonesia. He talks of the acoustic environment of Islamic countries in the call to prayer five times a day. The art music of the East related to this, the different versions of maqam in different Muslim countries. There was music in these areas before Islam and its call to prayer arrived, which evolved into mugham from the power of the sound of the call to prayer.

The birthplace of mugham is the town of Susa (pronounced Shusha), he says, though no Azeris live there any more. Then an overview of how the music works. Folk music has rhythm, while art music does not. Is mugham classical? No. Azerbaijan has its own European classical music tradition, so it can be called art music instead.

In the music of the East there are no chords, it's based instead on a monophonic structure. Mugham is modal music, meaning it is framed by octaves, and in addition to this it has dozens of scales, an enormous number of tonalities. It is meter-free, with no beat or time signature, and microtonal, with notes in between what we'd recognise as notes.

All this conspires to "makes it extremely exasperating to study and learn", Mr Werbock says. He should know - he's been studying it, and latterly performing and teaching around the world since the early 1970s.

Azerbaijani mugham singer Alim Qasimov performing at a concert on the occasion of the inauguration of Al-Azhar Park. - Photo: AKDN/Gary Otte

There's also dense ornamentation: trying to write it down like classical music ends up with "more ink on the page than white space" - you have to learn by observing a teacher, develop a sense and feel for the music. There is potential for improvisation in mugham which somewhat resembles the theme and variation style of improvisation in jazz. However, mugham is not jazz, and therefore the rules that govern its structure and its potential for improvisation - what he calls the syntax of mugham - is quite different from the syntax of jazz. Mr Werbock's program allows for a freer exploration of this aspect of mugham since he is playing alone, whereas it is mainly performed by an ensemble, and with a vocalist.

Now to the music - Mr Werbock picks up a short-necked, fretless lute, an oud. Its plucked strings have a soft power. From a gentle beginning the intensity gradually builds. It is a beautifully measured wildness: some notes drift and languidly unfurl, others detonate in explosive little clusters. He sways with fervour while playing. Then it stops - we'd been warned about allowing an extended pause at the end of a performance. During this his eyes are closed, he clutches the oud. An expression of rest, then a gentle smile, then a sadness, then peace. The eyes open, we applaud warmly.

Mr Werbock picks up the next instrument, a tar, a long-necked, fretted lute. He begins. It is louder than the oud, a more metallic and acute sound, ringing but too gorgeous to be shrill. What he plays is by turns passionate, skittish, desolate, galloping, rolling, gentle, majestic. Starts loosely, builds up to an astonishing, mesmeric wall of sound. There is a particular sequence of extraordinary urgency, fingers dancing over the higher frets, in what I can only describe as the gasp that saves you from drowning. My jaw gapes open during this. Then the pause at the end.

"I think the silence is delicious, it's exquisite, you feel it down to your feet," Mr Werbock says. He plays a scale, but leaves out the last note, creating an absence, a longing for closure. "Mugham prolongs and extends the yearning for resolution, so when it finally arrives..."

Now the final instrument. The kamancha is a "spiked fiddle", and he plays it with a bow, vertically. Its sound is akin to a haunting vocal, a wail as fingers slide down the neck. "Every kamancha has its own character," he says.

It is now time for questions. A young man in the front row asks how much is improvised, and how much of a mugham is from an original composition. Mr Werbock says that there is a cornerstone, but this can be improvised over and to demonstrate picks up the tar again and plays a melody three times, then improvises over and around it.

He goes on to discuss his role in the performance, that mugham can be a transcendent experience for a musician, though one during which he also has to concentrate on playing the music: he has to have two minds.

From the back of the audience a young man's voice with a slight accent asks him how he became interested in mugham.

"The first time I heard mugham was in 1972 in Los Angeles," Mr Werbock tells us. He had watched a performance by an old man from Dagestan, in Russia, but who had also lived in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. It had been a reduced, simplified form of mugham, "but the emotive power was at a peak." He says that he possibly wouldn't have wanted to learn if what he'd first heard was too complex; from this revelatory experience he began studying mugham in 1973. He's had a few tar and kamancha teachers since, and his main concern is authenticity. He travelled for the first time to Azerbaijan in 1989, when it was still Soviet. Mr Werbock adds that he's spent the past 35 years as a small part of a much larger process, to bring Azerbaijan's culture - "Biblical in its antiquity" - to new audiences around the world.

The evening is brought to a close by one of the organisers of tonight's event, who thanks Mr Werbock for his tour through mugham and the performances. He is instantly surrounded by people, asking questions, offering congratulations. We return to the cold winter night, awestruck into silence by this otherworldly music.

This event was organised as part of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijani Arts. For more information, visit www.butafestival.com

For more information on mugham, visit www.mugham.org

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