For Berkeley-reared tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian music is both a calling and a vehicle for exploring his family’s star-crossed past. A highly regarded improviser who’s performed and recorded with artists such as Brad Mehldau Trio drummer Jorge Rossy, bassist Ben Street, saxophonist Dayna Stephens, and R&B legend Johnny Talbot, Garabedian co-founded the innovative brass band Brass Magic. He is a regular member of the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra and SticklerPhonics with Scott Amendola and Danny Lubin-Laden.

Today Garabedian has shared “First Trip To Fresno,” which will be found on the upcoming release The Crazy Dog. Garabediqn says, “The lyrics for ‘First Trip to Fresno’ are adapted from a story my father wrote about his childhood memory of driving across the country with his family to visit his paternal grandparents in Fresno, CA. After my grandparents settled in Somerville, Massachusetts, the family was able to help out with bringing my grandfather’s parents and extended family over to the States. Many Armenians were immigrating to Fresno during that time, so my great grandparents ended up there. ‘First Trip to Fresno’ evokes a sense of adventure, excitement, and new experiences for a boy and his family driving across a foreign country while reinforcing my father’s love for his mother.

The first trip we took together as a family to Fresno to visit my father’s parents was in July 1931. I was 4 years old…The five of us rode in my father’s new Studebaker. It must have taken at least 10 days…on a southern route that went through Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. I remember the red mud in Oklahoma in a rainstorm…We would stop at the ripe grapevines to pick large leaves for my mother to make dolmas…All five of us slept in the same room…I lay rigid, hardly breathing…I refused sleep.”

The Crazy Dog, out March 15, a suite of new music composed and arranged by tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian, is both a departure and homecoming for the Bay Area musician. Writing for voice for the first time, Garabedian has sourced the project’s lyrics from his father and grandmother’s writings about their lives in Turkish Armenia and the United States. These now-lyricized writings—from “A Mother’s Letter” (And her feet, the elderly mother / Her feet place at the edge wearing winter on her head) to “March 17, 1927” (I arrived into this world / Kicking and screaming)—tell the family’s story of love, despair, displacement, survival, and resilience as they are violently uprooted from their home during the 1915 Armenian Genocide, and forced to emigrate to America, a journey that extended into 1921. Working from his grandmother’s poetry and plays, and his father’s short stories and memoir, Garabedian has honed his forebears’ words into an album of narrative poignancy and beauty.

This project is intersectional in its language: Garabedian has translated his grandmother’s native Western Armenian, put it into conversation with his father’s English, and adapted both to fit his musical voice through composition and rearrangement of their words to form lyrics. The Crazy Dog is also clearly intergenerational, with Garabedian adding his second-generation American Armenian voice to his family’s in this three-century-spanning project. Through the octet’s lush instrumentation of female voice, flute, clarinet, tenor saxophone, trombone, vibraphone, bass, and drums, Garabedian has produced a sonic means of conveying his deep connectedness to his family’s experiences, interpreted through his own musical lens and artistry.

Photo Courtesy: Lenny Gonzalez