Twenty-year-old Datev Gevorkian is the face of a new generation of Armenian-American musicians.
The 2020 Bedford High School graduate, a junior at Gordon College in Wenham, recently returned with a small ensemble of cousins and friends from Armenia, where they played in urban clubs and tiny villages.
Sunday afternoon Gevorkian and his oud will be on the Lowell Folk Festival’s Market Street Stage with his mentor, Mal Barsamian, for a 3:15 p.m. performance. They also will take part in a noontime stringed-instrument workshop at the same venue.
“I feel like I’m giving back to the Armenian community,” Gevorkian said. “A lot of younger kids are not playing Armenian instruments. At Armenian functions, there are a lot of older guys who play the oud, the dumbeg, the clarinet – Armenian diaspora music.”
“The music has a lot of hurt, a lot of happiness. The music tells a story, whether a dance tune or background,” he reflected. “Our ancestors fought very hard to protect the music. It’s my generation’s job to carry it on and keep passing it down.”
As a fourth grader, “I just loved music and instruments in general,” he recounted. One day his grandfather shared a book depicting traditional Armenian instruments. “I saw the oud and I said, ‘Wow, what is that? It’s super cool.’ It had a really interesting look to it, and I thought, ‘One of these days I want to play that.’”
A couple of years later, “My dad found a really cool deal – an oud for $100. I started teaching myself, listening to old Armenian records and CDs, eventually learning.” His family knew some experienced musicians and “they tried to teach me a couple of things.” Eventually, he started to learn from Barsamian, and “that was always fun.”
“I’ve learned a lot on my own, but to really master and refine it, to learn new techniques, I went to Mal. He would have suggestions on fingering, on keys. He really helped me refine it,” Gevorkian continued. His teacher is “unpretentious, never trying to show off,” although he is considered a virtuoso on nine instruments. “He is just something else.”
“There’s not a lot of sheet music – I hate reading sheet music,” Gevorkian said. When he accompanies more experienced musicians, it’s “what do you want to play? Do you know this song? I just keep listening, following along, and learning like that.”
The recent tour in Armenia – his third trip there — was planned last winter. The other four musicians were from Waltham and central Massachusetts. When do they practice? “We kind of don’t,” laughed Gevorkian. They got together a couple of times before the tour, but their gigs were well received because “we all know how everybody plays.”
Even tiny villages in Armenia are Westernized, Gevorkian said, although “everyone owns a cow. They’re happy, that’s the thing. It was a great learning experience and definitely a lot of fun.”
The repertoire most accurately is described as “diasporan” Armenian music, Gevorkian explained. When refugees fled what was to become the Armenian genocide of 1915 and 1916, to Syria, France, England, and the U.S., they added some instruments from other cultures – -the clarinet, for example, or guitar, or keyboard.
Even the oud is “not a traditional Armenian instrument,” Gevorkian said. The half-melon-shaped stringed instrument originates from Greece, from Turkey, from Arabic lands, he said. “Every Armenian oud player’s style is going to be different in America,” he observed. You can do a lot with it — I can play traditional Armenian pieces and also Armenian-American dances.”
“I hope to make a difference,” Gevorkian asserted. “The last thing I want is to have an ego. I hope I’m able to encourage younger kids to start learning these instruments – I started out playing just for fun at a summer camp in Franklin. We went to that camp the other day to perform; four kids came up and said, ‘Can we try the instruments?’ Of course, you can try them out.”
He noted that he also plays banjo and mandolin on the side, and hopes he has an opportunity to lead a Bluegrass service at Gordon.
Gevorkian is spending time working in Ipswich hayfields and cultivating almost an acre of corn in Billerica this summer. “I’ve always been passionate about farming, about agriculture,” he said – he is an environmental biology major with a minor in sustainable agriculture. He said he has gotten involved with a network of farmers on the North Shore.
Mike Rosenberg can be reached at [email protected], or 781-983-1763
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