Known quantities are always easier to assess. And Tigran is both a known quantity and known synecdoche for quality.
However, everyone can have an off day or try something new that doesn’t quite work. You’d need plenty of off days here given this work took ages to piece together.
Neither applies although Manifeste is more of a very ample side dish compared to some of his more focused and jazzier work. I’d argue his best work is still 2011’s A Fable but there has been some incredible work since so take your pick.
Certainly Manifeste does not begin in flakey, apologetic manner.
It’s full out thrashing prog on ‘Prelude for all Seekers’. You can tell his sound, it’s got Armenian chords with all the jazz [actually not that much here] and the rock.
The pianist-composer is without exaggerating one of the world’s greatest jazz adjacent pianists. I’ve heard him live – he’s very charismatic – and was lucky to have interviewed him over the phone when writing for another blog for about half an hour over a crackly line to Yerevan circa Luys i Luso. He speaks in halting tones, is deadly serious by the way. But that’s going back over a decade.
Far more recently I enjoyed his standards album StandArt album from 2022. It seemed like a new milestone at the time, maybe not so much from the distance of four years on.
But I think I like the at times bat crazy impetuosity and sprawling roar of Manifeste more.
This is completely different and was recorded between 2023 and 2025 all over the place, Armenia, Russia, Greece, America.
It’s certainly restless and could have been edited down a bit by dropping the odd track or paring back some of the track lengths. If anything there is simply too much. But nevertheless I liked the rampaging trumpet on ‘Yerevan Sunrise’ from Daniel Melkonyan early on. It’s the jazziest bit of all.
But even better it’s when Tigran goes quiet and you get seeping out from the chords an ancient wisdom.
That is enhanced by a choir ingeniously used particularly at the end of the album. It’s the Yerevan State Chamber Choir. He’s worked with the choir extensively before, going back at least to the aforementioned Luys i Luso.
Manifeste could have all got lost in a lot of incense, smoke and mirrors and become a straightforward album signalling faith not that there is anything wrong with that. It does but there’s more to the album than that.
I always think of Gurdjieff quite a bit when I listen to Tigran and sure enough and yet again go off after a while to listen to some Keith Jarrett doing the great Armenian mystic’s music on Sacred Hymns issued in 1980.
Jarrett “of course” knocks every living pianist – including Tigran – into a cocked hat. His take on Gurdjieff is beautiful.
But the hummable ‘One Body, One Blood’ is also brilliant here with the choir, journeying into the mystic and Tigran’s intervallic leaps and darts dynamic and playful like a welcome mendicant at the church altar flicker and charm.
Church bells ring out on ‘Seven Sorrows’ which is an incredible epic as Tigran hovers around the keyboard at warp speed and the choir do their cloak and dagger.
There’s generous use of synths that become like a river and again this feeds into the extravagant prog side of the record. But don’t let that put you off.
There’s quite a big cast of musicians in addition chipping in. I love ‘Dardahan’ which has a choppy compulsiveness to it and melodic plentitude.
There’s a helluva lot here. ‘War Time Poem’ – check the video – is futuristic and again if you come to the album for the synths then this is the key track. It does go a bit potty after a while like it’s some some of rewrite of Game of Thrones but that’s OK. ‘Ultradance’ is a bit Michael Wollny-like in its main theme when the German is at his most exuberant and thinks he’s in a nightclub dancing the night away deliriously on his tod.
Born in Gyumri, Armenia, in 1987, Tigran won the Montreux Jazz Festival’s piano competition in 2003 and Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition in 2005 as well as a Deutscher in 2021. But prizes mean nothing when you as a listener are alone with an album. They’re gong with the wind, pun intended.
Perhaps, scratch that, probably, it’s too grandiose in places and I can do without the whistling. There should be a moratorium on whistling! I’m also still a bit baffled about some minor representation in the instrumentation – just what a daf and blul are without looking these up [reader I eventually did: respectively they are a frame drum and a flute] defeats me entirely.
Even less happily searching for a comfort blanket I remain a bit meh about the vocals of Asta Mamikonyan that fleetingly waft in and out.
But then you come across a track like ‘National Repentence Anthem’ with the choir and you pick your jaw up off the floor. All is forgiven – the excess most of all neutered by the power of imagination and an exceptional grasp of mysticism and vision of his own country transcend the finickity. Tigran throws a lot against the wall. Reader, most of it, especially when he simmers down, sticks.
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