A saxophone spurts a bogglingly asymmetrical, free-falling melody. A nostalgic-sounding Hammond B3 organ churns a sweet, bluesy vamp sound. The drums playfully lock, drive and skirt around the groove. Shades of funk, soul, R&B and gospel are cooked up in a simmering jazz stew.
Welcome to Time, the compelling debut album from temperature-raising Dubai-based group ARS Trio.
The band bring together three of the city’s best jazz musicians, taking their name from their initials: alto saxophonist Artur Grigoryan, drummer Rony Afif and organist Samvel Gasparyan.
Each is a familiar face in his own right – Afif and Gasparyan are members of Abri & Funk Radius, the party-starting outfit best known for their weekly residencies at Jazz@Pizza Express and Blue Bar, while Grigoryan gigs in a piano duo with Gasparyan, among other projects.
Yet ARS stand apart from their other work as a project born of passion, not commerce: the musicians don't regularly play live together as a three-piece and have never performed the music from Time in the UAE. This is something these guys do simply for the love of it.
“I don’t have lots of faith to play this music in Dubai,” says Gasparyan, sadly. “To play jazz is a constant battle – and it’s only getting more challenging.”
The limited appeal, worldwide, of jazz – a primarily instrumental, improvised musical artform, demanding the greatest technical understanding of both musician and listener – is hardly news. But for Gasparyan, jazz embodies a greater sense of opposition – at the time of his birth, the genre was largely “banned” in his home country, Armenia, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
“I discovered jazz in my teenage years, after the collapse [of the Soviet Union],” says the 33-year-old. “I remember I had one Oscar Peterson vinyl that I kept playing again and again to transcribe the solos. It was hard to get – if you had one music book or record, everyone was taking it to make a copy.”
After formally studying classical music, in 2003 the pianist moved to the United States, where he spent nine years working as a musician in Los Angeles and Tennessee, primarily playing country music.
Returning briefly to Armenia, Gasparyan found himself in a Latin band alongside Grigoryan, another conservatoire-trained professional musician who had caught the jazz bug at a very young age after hearing a recording of Dave Brubeck's classic Take Five while a toddler.
“I was a 3, 4 years old,” says Grigoryan, 31. “There was just one jazz tune on this record, but even at that age, I just loved it. I said: ‘When I grow up, I want to play the saxophone.’”
That dream became a reality, but after years of gigging in clubs in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, he was ready for a change.
In 2012, he and Gasparyan moved to the UAE, where they played as a duo at various locations, including the Cigar Bar at Jumeirah Zabeel Saray.
“Artur was kind of bored, he wanted a change – a cruise ship, some way out of the country,” says Gasparyan. “I had the option of Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore – and I chose Dubai.”
It wasn’t long before the pair ran into Afif, a 37-year-old veteran of the UAE jazz scene who fled Lebanon, his homeland, in the midst of the 2006 war. If you have a passing interest in the genre, chances are you’ve seen Afif perform live, either leading his own group alongside his brother and bassist Elie, or at the Dubai Jazz Festival, Abu Dhabi Jazz Festival, Womad Abu Dhabi or du World Music Festival.
Afif's career reached a new peak last year with the release of solo album Zourouf, a stunning set of Arabic-tinged, self-penned instrumentals recorded in New York. It ranks among the UAE's top 20 best-selling albums of the past five years.
“I was planning my album for numerous years – before you do a thing, you can’t imagine it, it’s the end of the world,” says Afif of the new release. “But once you’ve done it, you realise you can do it again.”
Having jammed together in various bands, ARS Trio solidified last summer when they travelled to Armenia for a series of gigs. It was while they were there that Time was recorded, in just three days, live and directly onto analogue reel-to-reel tape at the former Soviet state-owned Melodiya studio.
“Everything was done in two or three takes – but usually we chose the first,” says Gasparyan.
The resulting performances capture the raw spirit of adventure – the joy of the musicians playing off one another – and some splendid solos, but things never stray too far from the finger-clicking soul-jazz idiom.
“It’s experimental, but not that experimental,” says Afif. “We still have our feet on the ground but there’s a lot of space for us to do stuff we don’t usually get to do.”
When, during a similar tour this summer, gigs in neighbouring Georgia were cancelled due to sudden floods, the band returned to the studio and laid down another album’s worth of material in a single day.
Before that sees the light of day, however, the trio want the world to find out about Time, with festival dates in Europe and North America in the works.
Closer to home, the band plan to debut the music from Time regionally at a future edition of For the Love of Jazz, a new monthly jazz night Afif will launch at Dubai's Blue Bar on Saturday, August 29. Alongside, of course, all the other corporate and bar gigs the life of a professional musician demands.
“For me, jazz is a personal thing – you don’t choose the music, it chooses you,” says Afif. “And once that mode of expression is in your hands, you can’t stop. You do all the other stuff to support it.”
• Find out more about ARS Trio and listen to their music at www.arturgrigoryan.com and www.ronyafif.com
rgarratt@thenational.ae
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Uefa Nations League: How it Works
The Uefa Nations League, introduced last year, has reached its final stage, to be played over five days in northern Portugal. The format of its closing tournament is compact, spread over two semi-finals, with the first, Portugal versus Switzerland in Porto on Wednesday evening, and the second, England against the Netherlands, in Guimaraes, on Thursday.
The winners of each semi will then meet at Porto’s Dragao stadium on Sunday, with the losing semi-finalists contesting a third-place play-off in Guimaraes earlier that day.
Qualifying for the final stage was via League A of the inaugural Nations League, in which the top 12 European countries according to Uefa's co-efficient seeding system were divided into four groups, the teams playing each other twice between September and November. Portugal, who finished above Italy and Poland, successfully bid to host the finals.
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How Tesla’s price correction has hit fund managers
Investing in disruptive technology can be a bumpy ride, as investors in Tesla were reminded on Friday, when its stock dropped 7.5 per cent in early trading to $575.
It recovered slightly but still ended the week 15 per cent lower and is down a third from its all-time high of $883 on January 26. The electric car maker’s market cap fell from $834 billion to about $567bn in that time, a drop of an astonishing $267bn, and a blow for those who bought Tesla stock late.
The collapse also hit fund managers that have gone big on Tesla, notably the UK-based Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF.
Tesla is the top holding in both funds, making up a hefty 10 per cent of total assets under management. Both funds have fallen by a quarter in the past month.
Matt Weller, global head of market research at GAIN Capital, recently warned that Tesla founder Elon Musk had “flown a bit too close to the sun”, after getting carried away by investing $1.5bn of the company’s money in Bitcoin.
He also predicted Tesla’s sales could struggle as traditional auto manufacturers ramp up electric car production, destroying its first mover advantage.
AJ Bell’s Russ Mould warns that many investors buy tech stocks when earnings forecasts are rising, almost regardless of valuation. “When it works, it really works. But when it goes wrong, elevated valuations leave little or no downside protection.”
A Tesla correction was probably baked in after last year’s astonishing share price surge, and many investors will see this as an opportunity to load up at a reduced price.
Dramatic swings are to be expected when investing in disruptive technology, as Ms Wood at ARK makes clear.
Every week, she sends subscribers a commentary listing “stocks in our strategies that have appreciated or dropped more than 15 per cent in a day” during the week.
Her latest commentary, issued on Friday, showed seven stocks displaying extreme volatility, led by ExOne, a leader in binder jetting 3D printing technology. It jumped 24 per cent, boosted by news that fellow 3D printing specialist Stratasys had beaten fourth-quarter revenues and earnings expectations, seen as good news for the sector.
By contrast, computational drug and material discovery company Schrödinger fell 27 per cent after quarterly and full-year results showed its core software sales and drug development pipeline slowing.
Despite that setback, Ms Wood remains positive, arguing that its “medicinal chemistry platform offers a powerful and unique view into chemical space”.
In her weekly video view, she remains bullish, stating that: “We are on the right side of change, and disruptive innovation is going to deliver exponential growth trajectories for many of our companies, in fact, most of them.”
Ms Wood remains committed to Tesla as she expects global electric car sales to compound at an average annual rate of 82 per cent for the next five years.
She said these are so “enormous that some people find them unbelievable”, and argues that this scepticism, especially among institutional investors, “festers” and creates a great opportunity for ARK.
Only you can decide whether you are a believer or a festering sceptic. If it’s the former, then buckle up.
How much of your income do you need to save?
The more you save, the sooner you can retire. Tuan Phan, a board member of SimplyFI.com, says if you save just 5 per cent of your salary, you can expect to work for another 66 years before you are able to retire without too large a drop in income.
In other words, you will not save enough to retire comfortably. If you save 15 per cent, you can forward to another 43 working years. Up that to 40 per cent of your income, and your remaining working life drops to just 22 years. (see table)
Obviously, this is only a rough guide. How much you save will depend on variables, not least your salary and how much you already have in your pension pot. But it shows what you need to do to achieve financial independence.
BORDERLANDS
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis
Director: Eli Roth
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