Narek Barseghyan, Bambir Rehearsal, Stop Club, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia

YEREVAN, Armenia – It’s well past midnight when Narek Barseghyan and Arman Kocharyan, lead guitarist and bassist with the Armenian rock band Bambir, return home. For once, they’ve decided to call it an early night, providing me with the opportunity to interview them over a bottle of vodka diluted down with orange juice.

Narek says he feels like drinking screwdrivers tonight rather than the more customary vodka drunk straight.

At the very least, it means that it will take a lot longer before speech becomes slurred, and the whole point of the interview is lost. An early Bob Dylan recording is playing in the background as we start to speak about the band in an old apartment building now overshadowed by half a dozen high-rises being built on Yerevan ’s prestigious northern avenue.

The two musicians have come a long was since leaving their native Gyumri in 2000. They’ve always been dynamic performers on stage, of course, but in recent years the band has matured musically. Now performing on an almost weekly basis at Yerevan ’s Stop Club, Bambir are attracting a sizeable and almost fanatical following in the still largely underground rock scene.

Four years ago, short haired and clean cut, the band resembled the stereotype of how most mothers hope their sons will turn out. Nowadays, hair is longer, and Bambir look and live like a rock band. Across the table, Narek lights a cigarette before pouring another cocktail. I’m here to find out more about the band’s history, and to discover what their future holds in store.

I can only hope that it all makes sense in the morning.

Beginnings

The name Bambir is derived from a little known traditional Armenian instrument similar to a cello piccolo, but just to confuse matters, it’s also the name of another folk-rock band that comes from Gyumri. Before Armenia declared its independence in 1991, it was this Bambir that was considered the best folk-rock band in the former Soviet Union, fusing Armenian and Celtic influences to seamless perfection.

No surprise then, that Barseghyan and Kocharyan are the 22-year-old sons of two members of the other Bambir, and that now, the name has been passed down to them to take to a new generation of rock fans in Armenia and beyond. Yet, it hadn’t always been like that, and especially when the two musicians, aged 9, decided to embark on their first musical collaboration.

NA (Narek & Arman) was formed at the end of 1992 when the older Bambir were in the United States. Barseghyan and Kocharyan decided to surprise their fathers by performing for them when they returned. Barseghyan’s father, however, was less than impressed, to put it mildly. Gagik Barseghyan, nicknamed Jag because of his love for the Rolling Stones, instead told them they’d never make good musicians.

Much better, he told the two budding musicians, to choose another career. “Something like agriculture, he suggested,” remembers Barseghyan, smiling.

Undaunted by parental displeasure, Barseghyan and Kocharyan wrote their first song, “I’m Crazy,” and it wasn’t long before they found another young musician to join the duo. During Christmas 1995, they discovered flautist Arik Grigoryan performing in a Gyumri restaurant. When the twelve year old said he liked the British folk-rock band Jethro Tull, that was all Barseghyan and Kocharyan needed to hear.

The newly formed trio started to write more and more material. “They were interesting songs with melodies played on flute,” says Barseghyan. “Interesting good, or interesting bad?” I ask. “Interesting awful,” Barseghyan responds, laughing. “We were shit.”

Nevertheless, in 1998, with a second guitarist and a drummer joining the lineup, Bambir II performed their first gig in Yerevan at the Cinema Nairi, and a second at the NPAC Contemporary Arts Center a month later. Finally, Narek’s father began to see promise in the young Bambir and the band visited the United States, performing at events to commemorate the anniversary of the tragic 1988 earthquake that devastated their native city of Gyumri.

Modern Times

By 2000, the band was once again without a drummer, but upon moving to Yerevan, soon found one in Ashot Kourghinyan, a friend living in the Armenian capital. Finally, the group, now down to four, started to perform regular sets. The following year, Bambir performed at the first ever Nagorno Karabakh Arts Festival held in the war-ravaged city of Shushi.

Despite an audience made up of socially vulnerable refugees more used to Russian, Turkish and Armenian pop music, it didn’t take long before the whole of Shushi was dancing to the sound of rock ‘n roll.

“Our life is rock ‘n roll,” says Barseghyan. “Our parents were some of the first hippies in Soviet Armenia, and that wasn’t easy back then. As a child, whenever I couldn’t sleep, my parents would put on Jethro Tull for me to listen to. I couldn’t fall asleep to Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix – only Jethro Tull.”

“My parents also listened to that music,” adds Kocharyan, looking up from playing a game on his mobile phone, “but I was mostly influenced by The Beatles.”

Like many other rock groups in Armenia, it was probably for this reason that the band first started out by playing covers. Although dynamic and exciting on stage, it wasn’t until 2003 and a meeting with Artyom Ayvazyan, President of the Antennae NGO and founder of the ArminRock internet portal, that the band truly began to form their own character by playing more of their own material.

“One day I was sitting with Artyom, drinking beer as usual, when I said we wanted to record two albums. One would be in English, and the other in Armenian. Artyom said we should start with our Armenian material first.”

The album, BBR, soon sold out in Armenia, but Barseghyan says that only a handful of CDs were bought by ethnic Armenians living in the U.S. Regardless, other Diasporan audiences were eager to hear their music, with the band performing six concerts in the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Only ethnic Armenians were allowed to come to our show,” he remembers, “but on the last night, many young Iranians managed to get in.”

Even now, Bambir’s audience is largely made up of a mixture of locals, Armenians from Iran, and visiting Iranian students. In recent months, more Diasporans from Europe and the United States have also started to appear at shows, but the Diasporan market in the U.S. and Western Europe is still proving tough to crack. Barseghyan says this is because rock music receives very little exposure in the Armenian media.

“The Diaspora [in the United States ] doesn’t know we have rock bands here,” he explains. “They think that we only have singers like Nune Yesayan. This isn’t real art, although let her sing. Armenia needs Nune, but the Diaspora must also understand that culture isn’t just about a handful of pop stars they see on satellite TV.”

Nonetheless, things look promising in Armenia. Bambir’s grueling two and a half hour performances at the Stop Club in Yerevan are filled to capacity, and their shows are always exciting. The band’s charismatic madcap antics always prove a huge success with a young, progressive audience.

“Gyumri is a city of humor,” says Barseghyan, “and our outlook is shaped by that. We’re clowns, and I’ve always wanted to make people laugh because for me, that’s a great art. In Armenia, we need that now, and especially among youth. We need to see more people smiling.”

And it’s perhaps Bambir’s local audience that says a lot about the band itself.

“We’ve got a new, more philosophical generation forming here. Maybe it’s not so many, but they’re there. Perhaps what we’re trying to say and do with our music is to tell youth in Armenia, and in fact everywhere, to start working together so that something can change sooner rather than later.“

As a result, in recent months Barseghyan has started to write new material depicting the lives of youth in Armenia, the extravagant lifestyle of the sons of government ministers, the obscene power of the oligarchs, poverty, the horrors of war, globalization, and of course, love.

The sound of Arik Grigoryan’s flute blends well with Barseghyan’s technically perfect improvised guitar solos, and a folk-rock sound evolved from the older Bambir. And although Bambir has yet to break into the Armenian-American market, Barseghyan is still optimistic about strengthening links between young Armenians wherever they might be.

“Armenia ’s future will be formed by a mixture of Diasporan and local youth,” he says. “They have something we don’t have, and we have something they don’t. We need them and they need us. Our future is together.”

And with that, at well past three in the morning, it’s time for the interview to end. Besides, the vodka and orange juice has long since run out, and as my eyes can hardly stay open, it’s also time to leave. As I do, however, I can’t help but wonder if the future Barseghyan imagines is closer than he thinks.

—

Onnik Krikorian is a journalist and photographer from the United Kingdom now residing and working in the Republic of Armenia for a variety of publications and international organizations.