Bios
Kennedy is the composer and curator of the Mad Composer Lab, a concept studio designed to explore the process of music composition. Kennedy’s musical vocabulary is eclectic, innovative and truly authentic. As a musician, Kennedy has performed with many professional ensembles playing bassoon and contrabassoon. Additionally, Kennedy performs on piano and an assortment of exotic instruments, including didjeridu and duduk and can be heard on various soundtrack recordings. Highly talented and expressive with the baton, he has served as conductor of the Monroe Symphony Youth Honors Orchestra, and has guested with a variety of groups from coast to coast. His background as an orchestral musician, conductor, and player of orchestral and exotic instruments offers Kennedy an unparalleled perspective in the workings and abilities of a wide range of ensembles in the marriage of sound, visuals, and emotion. This expansive and eclectic experience, united with his limitless imagination, allows him to offer in his music, an incredibly broad pallet of musical timbre and philosophies.
Vahid Kilani
I am Vahid Kilani. It should not be important to me or anybody else where and when I was born. But the inevitability of the date and location of my birth has influenced me a great deal, as it led to most of my childhood passing with a love and a passion for music. After finding out about the “Music Conservatory” very late in my youth, I rebelled at once and said a big no to all that was expected of me—education, job, college,… and I ran like a crazy lover to my old and apparently all-encompassing love, music. On this route, I embraced all of the difficulties with the help of kindness of my music masters (teachers and friends). I started in music with the violin, but after a year I left that and went to work as an assistant in the making of Iranian musical instruments. That is when I started playing the Tanbour. The obstacles were great, but my passion was even greater! Lack of government support for the arts and artists, especially for music, was clear to everyone, and so was the lack of communication and collaboration among artists in Iran. This left me inclined toward loneliness—fated to experience alone, practice alone, compose alone! I did not expect help from anyone. But, although a great deal happens and gets created out of loneliness, the result only expands its reach through communicating and sharing with others. As Edward Gibbon taught us, communication adds to wisdom and knowledge, but being alone is where gentility and creativity happen! I was practicing traditional Persian music, a music which despite all its beauty is tinged with prejudices and biases of “music people.” Although I really enjoyed that study, I did not limit myself to it. At the same time, I got a degree in making instruments as well as a membership in the Iran House of Music. However, I am not proud of this, as I believe the value of every person, artist or not, is in his or her output, not in degrees and credentials.
I am an ordinary person who is experiencing and learning. The eternal nature of humanity is in moving forward, as immovability leads to nothingness and extinction. As Houshang Ebtehaj says: Still water soon sinks into the earth/But the river rolling grows into a sea. Now, my first release in Tanbour playing has been created, of course with the help and support of you friends. I hope “Barzakh” will be an introduction to a full album of the same name, as well as an anecdote to geographic borders, to help us to reach together the apotheosis of art, which, to me, is creating another world and inviting others to that world to take a break from current human Barzakh (the temporary barrier between here and the hereafter) for some moments. In the end, I do not name myself anything and do not accept any label…except maybe a poet whose poems have achieved distance from words and are presenting themselves in other forms.

Play Music on the Porch 

Purgatory – Mad Composer Lab and Vahid Kilani (Portland meets Tehran)

دیدن توهم اشراق است دیدن اشراق توهم

Purgatory – Mad Composer Lab and Vahid Kilani (Portland meets Tehran)

Play Music on the Porch Day