For a third-year Engineering Science student, Amir Manbachi’s work-life balance is remarkably even.
Every week, Manbachi and a half-dozen other members of Chakavak, a Persian classical music ensemble, practice for five to six hours at his North York flat.
“I thought the amount of time I spent there would cause my marks to suffer, but my marks actually went up,” said Manbachi, who immigrated from Iran three years ago to enroll in Canada’s toughest engineering program.
Chakavak played two well-received shows at the Harborfront Centre last Saturday.
Manbachi’s brother, Reza Manbachi, Chakavak’s composer, founded the group in 1998. Two of the octet’s members hail from U of T. Pegah Rahimian, a life science student, handles the group’s publicity. Other members hail from York and McGill.
The group came together by chance, Manbachi said, since many of the instruments the group plays are very rare. He has played the tombak, his own instrument, since he was a child.
Chakavak’s performance on Saturday was inspired by the poems of Rumi, a 13th-century Persian philosopher, theologian, and poet. UNESCO declared 2007 the International Year of Rumi, and so Chakavak is hitting the road with two more shows next month, in Ottawa and Montreal, to spread Rumi’s message of goodness, charity, and peace.
What cheered Manbachi most about Saturday’s shows was the large non-Persian element of the crowd.
“They started clapping along, with their own rhythms from their own cultures,” he said.
-Mike Ghenu
