Mitra Sumara Revives The Classic Pop Music of Pre-Revolution Iran

In late 2020, Azar Mohebbi Tehrani passed away at the age of 73, due to complications that arose from contracting COVID. It’s a piece of news that barely made a blip in mainstream Western media, but for the people of Iran and the Iranian diaspora, the news of her death was shattering. Tehrani was better known to this community as Ramesh and, in the years before the 1979 revolution, she was one of the biggest pop stars in her home country. She left Iran in the wake of the events that ended with Iran being taken over by an Islamic republic and kept career going in the U.S. and Europe for some time. But it was in the ’90s that she opted to stop performing and recording as a form of protest against Iran’s banning of female singers.

One artist who was particularly affected by Ramesh’s death was a singer from New York named Yvette Massoudi. For the past decade or so, she has been leading Mitra Sumara, a group that specializes in modern renditions of classic Iranian pop songs from the ’60s and ’70s. Inspired in part by Pomegranates, a 2009 compilation tunes by artists like Ramesh, Googoosh and Kourosh Yaghmaei, Massoudi started the band to, in part, keep this music alive for future generations and to reconnect Iranians living in America with the sounds of their youth. But as she was figuring out where to take this project next, the news of Ramesh’s passing broke. She decided then to focus on songs performed by female singers from Iran, all of whom had been silenced or forced to leave the country, resulting in the recently released album Dream.

Though it came out of a particularly mournful and difficult stretch of Massoudi’s personal and creative life, the mood of Dream is decidedly upbeat, tapping into the funky, psychedelic energy of songs like “Nimeye Ghomshodeye Man” (originally recorded by Googoosh, the famed singer currently on her farewell tour) and one of Ramesh’s signature tunes, the restlessly romantic “Sharme Booseh.”

Massoudi hopped on a Zoom call with Paste to discuss surviving a difficult time leading up to the creation of her new album and starting a dance party with the older Iranians that come to see her and Mitra Sumara perform live. The conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Paste: There’s a better than average chance that readers of Paste are unfamiliar with Mitra Sumara. For those folks, how did this project get started?

Yvette Massoudi: This began a little more than 10 years ago after I met my Iranian birth father. I was adopted as an infant to American parents. I’m half-Iranian by birth, half-American. I spent most of my life looking for him. Then through a series of events after meeting him, I decided, “Oh, it could be really cool to do a band that does new arrangements of this music in particular. I discovered this music on the Internet as I was looking for him. So there’s a special meaning for me. There used to be a great Iranian expatriate website where people would put up their personal stories of immigration, poetry and videos. They’d post videos of old TV excerpts of these old pop singers. I thought the music was incredible. The visuals they were performing around had these very psychedelic backgrounds, just like American variety shows, but it’s Persian. So very exotic at the same time.

Before I met my father, I tried to learn Persian. I would go to this Iranian deli in New York and buy these bootleg CDs of old Googoosh songs, and Dariush songs — the biggest stars from the day. I would talk to my father a lot about this music after we started to get to know each other. It was maybe a year and half later that the Pomegranates compilation came out. And I thought, “Wow, this is great.” Because it wasn’t out of the Iranian deli where I could hear this music anymore. It was popular among non-Iranians. So then, I thought, “I want to cover these songs that are on that album.” I knew all the songs already from listening to those CDs that I would get from the deli. I thought, “You know, I know enough people, I could put a band together,” and so I did! And that was the band that was on the first record called Tahdig that I did in 2018.

You said you were attempting to learn Persian, but were you familiar enough with the language that these original performers were singing in?

They’re all in Farsi and there’s one on the new record that’s actually in Kurdish. Before I met my father, I was trying to sing these songs phonetically. And back then there weren’t really very good resources for learning Persian in New York City. I tried taking a class at this small place that was run out of a jewelry store, and it was very awkward. I didn’t last very long there. After I met my father and when I got the idea to learn the songs and sing them, I found a class at NYU Continuing Education and a great teacher who I studied with for a number of years. Most of it was to learn and understand the songs. I’m not fluent but I can read Persian okay.

Between the release of Tahdig and the new album Dream you weathered a lot of storms in your life. How was that time for you?

I spent 2019 as a caregiver for my boyfriend who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and underwent treatment for that. That summer, I was getting wind of a label in the U.K. who was interested in helping us do a second album, and talks were coming and going a little bit. Then by the fall, my mother fell terminally ill with melanoma. So as soon as my boyfriend, now my husband, recovered, my mother fell ill. It’s much harder to look after a parent, I think, and when you’re not dealing with someone who’s getting better to live… They sent me a contract toward the end of the time that my mother was basically dying, and I couldn’t really even think about it. I said that I needed more time to think about this. They were very understanding. She passed at the end of 2019 and with a period of mourning, I wasn’t able to really solidify the contract and send it back with red lines until February of 2020. By then, COVID was starting to happen in Europe and they said, “Oh, actually, we can’t honor this offer anymore.” I was crushed.

I was still thinking of putting this record out even though I wasn’t sure if it was going to be possible. Then Ramesh, who was a pop singer in Iran, died during the pandemic. She’s not someone that I would hear many Iranians or anyone interested in Iranian pop music talk about, but I always really loved her voice. She was interesting because she left Iran after the revolution to continue her career in Europe and then the U.S., but she stopped in the ’90s in protest that the Islamic regime continued to ban women from singing in public. That was a very remarkable and bold thing to do. I wanted my next record to have more of her songs on it for that very reason. And this was eight months before the murder of Mahsa Amini. I was thinking that the point of this record would be to talk about the fact that women aren’t allowed to sing in public there but there was a time when women could lead bands. They could sing on stage as soloists without risking their lives.

What was your process when it came to choosing what songs to tackle for Dream? What songs were really speaking to you at that time?

“Aroose Noghreh Poosh” is one of my favorites so that was definitely going to be on there. One thing I do is look at the lyrics. Even though I’m not always singing for a Persian speaking audience, I like to know what I’m singing about, and I love the beauty and drama of those lyrics. Most of them speak about very intense love so I wanted to be able to choose songs that resonated with me. Also songs that had room to shift things around a bit and still hold up. I chose a different group of musicians to play on it because I wanted to have a different sound, so songs that would work with a quieter, more intimate sound. Three songs were attributed to Ramesh: “Aroose,” “Sharme Booseh” and “Asmar Asmar,” the Kurdish folk song that we do at the end. I’m really glad to include a lot of her songs.

Many of the people you recorded with were also of Iranian descent, yes?

In the studio I worked with Yahya Alkhansa who is an Iranian drummer who used to play with Mohsen Yamjoo. He toured all over the world with him. Right now he’s been touring with Marjan Farsad and with Ali Azimi from Radio Tehran. He’s a very busy guy and I was really glad to get him in the studio for a couple of days. He and my producer Salmak Khaledi went back years because they were founders of the 127 Band, which was the underground band from the early 2000s out of Iran.

I ask because in the notes for the new album it talks about you all learning of the news of Mahsa Amini’s murder while you were in the studio and the effect that had on you all.

It was very intense. We had just finished recording all the basic vocal tracks. It just stopped everything. Everyone was in such horrible sadness, just constantly looking at the news, mostly through social media. American news outlets didn’t really cover it the way I think most of us would have liked. It just grew and grew and grew. For many of them, it seemed very hopeful that things would actually change.

Is that something that you are getting a sense of from the Iranian community, that things could be taking a positive turn in the country? Or at least were before the current situation in the Middle East?

I think people really don’t know. A lot of people are worried about war. For a long time, people were hopeful that things would change but now because of what’s going on in the Middle East, I think a lot of people are just really not so sure. Women are still being killed by government authorities for improper dress or for doing things that many of us take for granted in our own lives here. But I think, at this point, everybody’s worried about other forces. We don’t know. We really don’t know.

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but what sort of response do you get from folks from the Iranian diaspora living here in the States who may have grown up with this music you are playing?

I’m very lucky because I get really great responses. Anytime Iranians from that generation come to my shows, they dance like crazy and they sing along because they know all the words. It’s my favorite time because I’ll pass the mic. It’s the best engagement to take this music out of the little time capsule that it’s in. It reflects a time and a place that doesn’t really exist anymore. I love to give it new life and show that it still has vitality and it’s still important to people no matter what context it’s in. I’m not trying to sound like those singers. I’m not trying to emulate them. They’re too amazing. I don’t even want to go there. I’m lucky enough to have the chance to create something new out of it. The best way I can participate is through pop music and to connect to my culture.

What comes next for you and this project?

I’d like to book a little tour in the spring. I’m going to be looking at performing arts centers. What I’d like to do is be able to come to colleges and talk about this music and talk about improvisation within it and talk about my experience as an adoptee connecting with my culture. There’s a big difference between cultural identity and cultural appropriation. What I’m trying to do is expand upon that culture.