Sina Lorenzo Jazayeri

The gates of music and musicianship were opened up when I was an 11-years-old kid struggling to make the school times a tad bit easier. I was lucky enough to be introduced to a drummer named Sepanta Noori who, by that time, had the sticks in his hand performing with the most successful players of the time. Before I knew it, unlikely to believe for the kid, a Japanese TAMA drum-kit was in my room and the noise was getting more understandable for the other 300 neighbors surrounding my room in 12 stories. Good music was opened up. Deep Purple’s “burn” and Camel’s “Rajaz” ruled my days. Dry drum sounds of the 70’s, long necked basses, the purple rain logos, organ solos on top of 2/4 rhythms and everything about pentatonic scale. Everything changed and all I wanted was right there. For about a year into 4/4 rhythms and 8th notes I found out Sepanta was leaving for Austria and I knew I was going to carry on by my self. The musical expressions started to come out of the closet. I figured out there was more music out there and Metallica was the next step. The S&M show was a new thing for me because of all the differences it had with everything else I’d heard before.Long story short, experiencing each different way of speaking with the music made up different steps until the day one of my friends gave me a CD that said “Images and Words”. Odd times seemed impossible by that time to an extent that I did not even think about having 7 or 5 eighth notes in a bar and when I heard “Images and Words” I was fully stunned, not because of it’s power, not to mention I did not understand any more than 2% of it, but because of it’s differences, the new tones and expressions, progressive music. Odd time signatures started to make sense and for me as a drummer that was the most important thing to understand from the music. After weeks and months of struggling with the tunes I felt comfortable enough to start playing with some other progressive players. Agah Bahari was a friend of mine with big ambitions to develop progressive knowledge and experience. Although I still think I wasn’t completely where he was technically I decided to give my self a chance to challenge my self in this newly-gained style of music. There was nothing like seeing the improvements by minute. We challenged our selves by covering the music that seemed tough to us by that time. Aside from dealing with the misplacements of the environment that were surrounding us, it was a very good time, the spring of 2001, productive, exciting, fun and challenging.Finally we hooked up with a bass player named Ardavan AnzabiPoor who had his own album named Thunder. He had plans to start a band opening with live concerts around the city. The music was not completely satisfactory to our progressive fantasies, or abilities, but it was a good chance to mix up our taste of progressiveness with a metal band. So we decided to prepare for a new experience and put down our ideas and tastes together and make up a band that could please all of us. We named the band Exir after the joining of the forth member (Homayoon Majdzade). Three months of full-time dedication to Exir came up with rather good results which ended up in 4 sold-out shows in Tehran Art University (Summer of 2002) followed by lots of good words from the whole musical community of Tehran, which was made up of certain types of people who lived in the capital.Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, Exir was a 15 minute joy and did not lead to anything else but Homayoon Majdzade and Ardavan AnzabiPoor did start up their own band named “Kahtmayan”. Although I had ambitions to leave the country very soon I started off with Kahtmayan as the drummer but after a couple of months we knew the chemistry was not right and I was replaced.Right after graduating from high school I knew it was a good time to leave the country and invest my time and energy somewhere that I can be accepted and developed with less amount of lost energy so, with the support of my parents, I decided to join my brothers in Queensland, Australia (March 7th, 2004 ). Every since I’ve been living in Australia I’ve had the chance to play music with many musicians of different tastes and styles but after all in an industry as tight and difficult as music (Or any other art field) there isn’t time for beating around the bush and the nature of Australian music is greatly against progressive music, music with lots of changes and challenges, different timings and arrangements, and basically it’s against the music we can’t dance, clap or band their heads to.During this period I’ve had all the time in the world to learn about Jazz and Fusion music. Even though these styles take life-time-education to master in, I’ve had time to observe and learn from impressive records, and of course with the existence of internet the only element learners need is passion.The only formal contribution I had in the music industry in the last couple of years must be playing with a band named Solea. Samba Sundays belonged to this band, performing Spanish Samba music 9PM-2AM every Sunday. For me it was very good time to play something I never have and learn from others, and although it was hard for me to do I managed to become a background rhythm from being one quarter of the spokesmen.After all, music has been a key, journey surfing with the aliens through the dark side of the moon and I could not be more thankful to my family and my very dear friend Sepanta Noori for showing me the way to musicianship which lead to learning about life.