Kiya Tabassian (CA)
From Tehran
Popularity
Kiya Tabassian has 3 upcoming shows in the Netherlands. The next one is on October 3, 2026 at Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. All 3 tour dates
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About
Kiya Tabassian is the kind of musician who treats genre boundaries as suggestions. Born in Tehran and based in Montreal, he founded the ensemble Constantinople in 1998, building it into a vehicle for blending Persian musical traditions with medieval European, Mediterranean, Baroque, and West African sounds, among others. His instrument of choice is the setâr, a traditional Persian string instrument, and his work as composer and artistic director has taken Constantinople to stages like the World Music Institute in New York and Chicago's World Music Festival. His collaborations read like a passport: recordings with Ghalia Benali, Marco Beasley, Ablaye Cissoko, and Holland Baroque, plus vocal contributions to the Assassin's Creed Origins soundtrack. In 2020 he co authored a musical and poetic suite inspired by life stories collected from Montreal care home residents, a project that says a lot about how seriously he takes music as a social act.
