During the closing week of Chicago Works: Maryam Taghavi, the musical duo Jamshid Jam perform a sonic response to the exhibition. Featuring Ramin Roshandel on setar and Jean-François Charles on electronics, Jamshid Jam’s improvised performances have been heard on stages across the United States.

About the Performers

Ramin Roshandel is a composer and setar improviser. He grew up in a family surrounded by artists; his luthier dad, his painter uncle, and his setar instructor Farshid Jam had strong influences on him as a teenager. Roshandel worked with the renowned Mohammad Reza Lotfi at Maktab-Khāne-ye Mirzā Abdollāh and won second place in the 7th National Youth Music Festival in Tehran, Iran. As a composer, Roshandel works with indeterminate, improvisatory, and liminal structures to contrast or converge with post- or non-tonal forms. On the one hand he is inspired by Persian music intervals, on the other he is mindful of phenomena such as instability, cultural identity, and communicational language.

Jean-François Charles is Associate Professor of Composition and Digital Media at the University of Iowa. He creates at the crossroads of music and technology. As a clarinetist, he has performed improvised music with many artists, from Maurice Merle to Douglas Ewart and Gozo Yoshimasu. He worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen for the world premiere of Rechter Augenbrauentanz.

Ramin Roshandel and Jean-François Charles have worked on several projects together. Roshandel was the setar soloist for the premiere performances of Charles’s opera Grant Wood in Paris in 2019. They performed together as part of the live soundtrack composed by Charles and Nicolas Sidoroff to the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame movie, a commission by FilmScene with premiere performances in November 2023 in Iowa.

As the Jamshid Jam duet, Ramin Roshandel and Jean-François Charles have developed a unique sound combining the traditions of Persian classical music and live electronic music. They have been creating this new shared musical language since their first concert in December 2019. They have been invited to perform in Ames, IA; Chicago, IL; Iowa City, IA; Omaha, NE; New York, NY; Tucson, AZ; and Warrensburg, MO. Their debut album, Jamshid Jam, is available on streaming platforms and CD.