The Sedākhāne Report is Sedākhāne’s magazine, published quarterly on the Sedākhāne website as well as on paper. This publication is an ongoing report of released works of folk music in Iran from the late 1950s to the mid-2000s, showcasing the content of the Sedākhāne Archive through indexes and articles. In each issue of the Sedākhāne Report, a purposeful part of the index will be published, the physical versions of which are available in the Sedākhāne Archive. In each issue we present relevant articles where we share our interpretations, impressions, and analysis of the contents of the archive. Scanned images of original labels and covers, as well as selected audio albums, will accompany each index to provide a visual and auditory perspective.
Issue 1
The Boulevard of United Cities
The largest volume of folk music production in Iran in the two forms of 45-rpm records and cassette tapes undoubtedly belongs to the Azerbaijani Turkish music. Thus, it seemed quite meaningful to dedicate the first Sedākhāne Report to the index of 45-rpm records of the Azerbaijani Turkish music in Iran, which account for about a third of our entire record archive. The scans of the labels and covers, as well as two audio albums, accompany this index. This visual and audio selection is the outcome of devoted periods of studying, watching, and listening to about 600 records of the Azerbaijani Turkish music in Iran.
The 29 selected works that accompany this volume in the form of two audio albums have been chosen in such a way that they show the stylistic and auditory range of the 45-rpm records’ long index of the Azerbaijani Turkish music in Iran, including Ashiqi music, Azerbaijani classical music, popular music, Motrebi music, pieces based on satirical poems, Arabic-style cabaret music, pieces close to Kurdish and Armenian music, etc. The lyrics of the 29 works along with their Farsi translations are included in this issue.
In addition to the index of records, the focus and heart of this issue is the article titled, “A Brief Account of the Establishment of the Music Production Industry in Iran; the Record Industry and its Relation to Folk Music” which is the first coherent extract of the history of the record industry in Iran. In this article, an attempt is made to present an understandable narrative of the growth of the music production relations in Iran by combining the general knowledge with the specialized one in the field of the record industry history. Moreover, this article seeks to go beyond the Tehran-centered narratives in order to grasp at a broader and more compelling relationship between the record industry, Iran’s geography, and folk music. The aim of the article is to trace the history of the growth of an industry in Iran and its connection with people’s lives in different cities. Obtaining the historical development of this narrative is the result of years of research on the record industry in Iran conducted by Ahmad Jafari,the Sedākhāne Report’s editor-in-chief and ethnomusicology graduate from Tehran University of Art. This chronological article begins with the arrival of European record companies in Tehran during the constitutional era (1900s) and continues until the spread of cassette tapes in the mid-2000s.
The title of this issue, The Boulevard of United Cities is an adaptation of the “United Nations Street” in Tabriz which used to be the hub of recording, producing, and distributing music, as well as the heart of interaction between people and cassette stores when cassette tapes became popular. The main hangout of musicians and especially Ashiqis was the tape stores and coffee houses of this street.
All the texts in this issue have been translated into Turkish, Arabic, and English in the hope of connecting with similar ideas, visions, and concerns in a wider geography.