Who is Pirouz de Caspio?
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Flamenco is my drug of choice
Flamenco is a journey and there is no destination - only rest areas!
After 20+ years of flamenco, I still enjoy a variety of musical genres of high quality and since childhood, my go to bands, outside of flamenco, have always been "Pink Floyd" and "Camel".
Something magical happened one day which set the path for my journey in flamenco up until now and probably for the rest of my life.
The year was 1998 and I never forget that day in the university where I was completing my degree in Computer Science where at the pub, I got to see this guy playing flamenco on the guitar while casually sitting on one of the tables with his foot on one of the chairs with a few other people sitting around the table and drinking beer. I got closer and started watching him play as I was interested because after nearly 10 years of having left my home country of Iran, I once again heard the sound of flamenco where I expected it the least - the Simon Fraser University pub in Vancouver, Canada!
As I was actively listening to him play and watching his hands, one of the guys sitting around the same table told me "Hey, there's this place near downtown called Kino Café where they have live flamenco performances every Sunday. Do you wanna go check it out?" His name was Lucky and he was a professor at the university. I was indeed "lucky" for having been re-introduced to flamenco in Vancouver through him. We became friends and continued to meet up at Kino Café every week for well over 15 years where I also started performing occasionally and saw the place change hands 3 times over the years until it finally couldn't survive the economical impact of Covid due to lockdowns and was forced to close down in 2022.
Biography
Pirouz Ebadypour aka Pirouz de Caspio was born in Tehran, Iran in 1969 to an artist friendly family. With uncles who were musicians and painters from both sides of the family, it was no wonder that arts had a natural place in his heart as it had been a part of the family culture for generations.
In addition to school, he started to study classical music theory, solfege, and voice training from the early onset of his childhood at 7 years of age. This training was part of a comprehensive musical training program offered by superb teachers from all corners of the world. The instruments of choice at the time were the Violin at first and then the Piano. The school in which he received his formal training was a very reputable institution called the "Music Institute of Tehran" or "Kargah-e-Moosighi" in Farsi.
After migrating to Canada, at age 21, he bought a second hand guitar in Vancouver and a few years later, he started taking his first formal guitar lessons in flamenco around the year 2000 from a teacher from Vancouver by the name of Gary Hayes aka Gerardo Alcala. That is where he learned some of the musical foundations of flamenco by learning to play various forms or "palos" of flamenco along with the various time signatures used in flamenco. He continued to take lessons for a few years on and off and then started to take a more serious interest in flamenco singing after he became more familiar with the works of the legendary flamenco singer "Camaron de la Isla". cont...
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His journey in flamenco took a turn and he spent less time playing the guitar and more time learning to sing flamenco and taking classes with some of the greatest flamenco singers from Spain and France including, Cristo Cortes who taught him his first letras in Bulerías and Tangos, David Lagos, for Soleá and Bulerías, Enrique Soto for Martinete and Seguiriyas, and many more throughout the years.
In 2003, he started the Annual International Jondo Flamenco Festival in Vancouver, Canada and as a result, created an opportunity to not only contribute toward the promotion of high quality flamenco in Canada, but also to learn through exposure and participation. During this time, he performed at the famous Kino Cafe and East is East for more casual encounters and at larger venues such as the Centennial Theater, Kay Meek Center for the Arts, the Chan Center for the Arts, the White Rock Playhouse. the Vancouver Playhouse, the Queen Elizabeth Theater, and the Stanley Theater with local as well as internationally recognized artists.
He also started the "Peña Bulería Flamenco Club" in Vancouver with a video library of over 600 hours of professional flamenco shows from Spain for its members to enjoy. Keep in mind that this is all before the YouTube and other streaming services were even available.
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He also started the very famous "Flamenco Beat Radio" which was the first online radio station dedicated to streaming quality and commercial-free flamenco content 24 hours a day 7 days a week. He owed this creation to his Engineering skills in his formal field of studies in Computer Science. He had not only developed, done the coding, and built the website for the station, he had also built the infrastructure and servers to support the hosting of the site and all the streaming requirements to manage over 6000 titles and growing.
This radio station was recognized in Spain and mentioned in the "Alma 100" magazine as well as on the "Jerez Jondo" website. The station was also endorsed by dozens of world-class artists from Spain with their voices announcing the name of the station during live broadcasts. This station stopped its streaming services in 2016 after he moved to California where he currently resides.
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In 2010, he dipped his toes in the realm of fusion of Flamenco with Traditional Persian music with none other than one of the top masters of Tar from Iran, master Ali Ghamsari. This collaboration came to life with the help of Ali Razmi (Setar player) from Vancouver.
This was a great opportunity that opened his eyes to another dimension of possibilities that he knew would take decades to understand and master - so even with having been a performing flamenco artist for over 20 years with having the opportunity to work with world-class musicians as well as having grown up in Iran where he studied music extensively and became familiar with the traditions of Persian music, its scale, intracacies and complexities, he still feels that when people talk about fusion, the term "fusion" shouldn't be taken lightly.
"Fusion" does not mean putting a group of musicians from different cultural backgrounds with different musical instruments on stage and creating a hodgepodge and calling it fusion. Fusion is where music flows naturally while respecting the rules of the genres in such a way that when a respective audience member listens to it, they can still connect to it effortlessly without ever feeling like they have left their cultural comfort zone. To his this is true fusion and it is very difficult to achieve, but it is unfortunately a term which has always been misused by many.
Check out this Georgia Straight editorial on one of his projects back in 2013 on a showcase featuring Flamenco and Persian music: Persian and Spanish styles find common ground at the Jondo Flamenco Festival | Georgia Straight Vancouver's News & Entertainment Weekly
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From 2003 to 2015, he collaborated and had the honor of performing with almost every flamenco artist in Canada and Western United States. In the summer of 2015, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he currently resides and started to work and collaborate with some of the best musicians in North America and world class artists from Spain and France. He regularly, but infrequently performs and have performed at all the usual venues for flamenco such as the Sound Room with Agua Clara Flamenco, the Thirsty Bear, the Bissap Baobab, La Peña, Anaviv's Table with Keni "El Lebrijano" and recently started a production called the "Jondo Flamenco Series" at the Club Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA amongst others.
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In 2012, he composed and performed the music for the feature film "Kayan" which won and was nominated for several international awards in major film festivals around the world, directed by Maryam Najafi.
He was responsible for putting together a strong cast of flamenco musicians and dancers to choreograph an all original dance component to the original theme music which we performed live during the filming of the movie as part of a very important scene and the turning point of the story.
Cast: Pirouz de Caspio (Cante), Jose Vega Jurado (Guitar), Nat Hulskamp (Oud), Manuel Gutierrez (Baile), Cithli Ocampo (Baile)
Watch the trailer and read more about it at the link below: