Grammy Award-winning music producer Ian Brennan announces his latest project: The first album ever to feature the wisdom and voices of those over 100 years old.
This album, The Oldest Voice in the World (Azerbaijan) “Thank you for bringing me back to the sky” (Six Degrees Records, release date: April 7), consists of 22 pieces with five bonus tracks featuring artists Brennan has collaborated with: The Kronos Quartet, Tinariwen, Malawi Mouse Boys, Yuka Honda, and The Good Ones (Rwanda).
In late 2021, Brennan and his wife, Italian-Rwandan filmmaker-photographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli , traveled to the southern mountains of Azerbaijan, where legend has it that the world’s oldest man hailed from there — having survived to age 168.
Brennan and Delli made the ambitious excursion to these remote rural villages amid a deluge of social media posts on best practices for “staying young.”
Upon their arrival in Azerbaijan, the couple found villagers had been ravaged by Covid-19 and most residents over 100 had died in recent months, including the oldest known woman in the country.
Traversing from village to village, they came to discover centenarian after centenarian living without indoor plumbing, sleeping on floor-bound mattresses, and what seemed to Brennan, that the Talysh people were almost anticipating their arrival with such a warm reception.
Brennan is known for scouring the far stretches of the globe to document singers in an uninhibited, authentic fashion.
From recordings in regions such as Rwanda, Malawi, South Sudan, Karachi, Comoros, Palestine, Ukerewe Island, Cambodia, and Romania, this latest project brought him to a region where no outsiders wander.
The villages were so remote, Brennan’s Azerbaijani-speaking companion from the city advised that the locals’ words were completely unintelligible.
Even the Talysh speaker from the valley below could make out less than 80% of what was being said in the remote mountain villages.
As the couple began meeting the centenarians, one theme was ever-present. Most would sing of their mother, and their secret to life was simple, “I was loved.”
Voices were recorded in their natural living environments. For instrumentation along with their voices, Brennan used the wood-burning furnace providing heat for the house, a walker, their own footsteps, a broken bedroom door, or the farm flour grinder.
“The texture of their singing was as if they had voices featuring distortion boxes built by time,” says Ian Brennan. “While recording, I removed my headphones more than once thinking there was some malfunction in the machinery, only to realize that what I was hearing was the singer’s pure tone. This project was a rare instance in music where the majority of people did not make the cut due to being too young — a mere 90 or 86 failed to impress.”
Brennan and Delli experienced raw emotion.
A former shepherd was overcome and shakily stood up to leave the room after having sung a song his mother used to sing. Brennan recalls, “We feared our visit had caused him unnecessary upset. But when he returned, he beamed, grabbed my hand and kissed it repeatedly, and said ‘Thank you for bringing me back to the sky.’”