New York- Yes, I’m doing another quick tanbur post. In all my years traveling across Iraq and Syria as a reporter and analyst, there was a lot of downtime while waiting in limbo for access to this or that story or scoop. In such often nerve wracking circumstances I’d find myself doing a lot of frustrating sitting around . Akin to watching a pot boil. Yet in Kurdistan, inevitably a friend of a friend would start strumming a beautifully crafted tanbur which would have the effect of forcing me to sit still, be present in the moment, and reframe my present.
Sure I still was anxiously waiting to get to the front but I was in the Middle East. Away from home and flourishing. And with that I was immersed in the sounds of an Indo-Iranian language coupled with its music that had the power to lift the imagination out of the stolid doldrums of boredom into the lyrical undulations of the Zagros mountains.
