TEHRAN-Celebrated Iranian musician Kayhan Kalhor will collaborate with renowned Turkish musician and singer Erdal Erzincan at a concert in Coventry, England, in November.

Warwick Arts Center at the University of Warwick will host the join performance on November 20, ISNA reported on Friday.

Grammy Award winner, Womex Artist Award winner and five-time Grammy Award nominee Kalhor is regarded as the world’s greatest master of the kamancheh (a spiked fiddle).

One of the most exciting of his innumerable projects and unique collaborations that have attracted audiences around the globe is his duo with the renowned baglama player Erzincan.

Their album “The Wind,” in which Iranian classical and Turkish Sufi music were entwined, was released in 2006 by ECM, a Munich-based independent record company, and their collaboration has remained vibrant ever since.

In 2011, the duo recorded a live improvisation album named ‘Kula Kulluk Yakishir Mi’ in Turkish (literally, how unseemly it is to follow blindly), in Busra, Turkey. In August 2013, the album was released through ECM Records in the US.

Kalhor and Erzincan have so far performed together several times at various venues including Tehran’s Vahdat Hall, Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and Vancouver’s Centennial Theater among others.

The classical music traditions of Persia and of Ottoman Turkey that inspire the music of Kalhor and Erzincan share a great deal in common, including the ancient modal compositional system known as maqam, and the idea of improvisation plays a definitive role in their intensely spiritual and emotional performances.

Their music is thoroughly modern and seeks to bring the listener into its trance-like realm by interweaving ecstatic rhythms with sensual melodic phrases. The result is a set of instrumental compositions that flow into each other like one continuous work, with gently drifting passages in which the two instruments echo and improvise on different phrases.

Kalhor, 59, is one of Iran’s acclaimed artists. After studying music in Rome, he moved to Canada, where he graduated from the music program at Carleton University in Ottawa.

A master of kamancheh, he is widely known for his stirring improvisations, exquisite compositions, and extensive collaboration with international artists including Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, New York based string quartet Brooklyn Rider, American string band Kronos Quartet, Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov and many other orchestras around the world.

Kalhor has composed works for and played alongside the famous Iranian traditional vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri. He has also composed and performed with the Indian sitar player Shujaat Husain Khan and Indian tabla player Swapan Chaudhuri in the group Ghazal.

SS/SAB