Thinking back, I realise that my earliest memories are tied to sound. Before I could really explain the world to myself, music was already doing that work for me. It helped things make sense. It connected feelings, places, people, and many things that otherwise felt separate from one another. Even as a child, I intuited that there were forces around me whether in school or general society that tried to divide, to separate, to categorise. But my child’s view of the world was one of oneness, continuity, wholeness. The music that surrounded me gave me a sense that my intuition was right. It held deep secrets that assured me that all the new experiences of childhood really were part of one complete story that was unfolding around me.

I was born to Azerbaijani parents and came to London when I was a small child. London felt vast and layered, full of voices and rhythms from everywhere. At home, though, there was another distinct world. My father and his circle of poets, musicians, and thinkers filled our living space with sound. I didn’t think of it as learning back then. I was just listening and absorbing everything like a sponge, as children do. The oud, the setar, the tonbak were almost like friends and I started to play them when I was still very young. And the moods evoked by Azerbaijani mugham were totally alive to me. These sounds told stories and ways of knowing and being that I perceived, but didn’t find elsewhere. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I felt that it could hold whole worlds of joy, sorrow, longing, and hope all at once. These were then and still are now very real presences that arise for me when such music is performed.

Then I would step outside our door and enter another sound world entirely. Western classical music found me there. I learned piano and violin, and I spent hours with composers whose music opened up new emotional and conceptual landscapes. I didn’t experience these worlds as opposites. I didn’t think, ‘this is Eastern, this is Western’. I simply felt that they belonged together inside me. Music was the clear space where everything met.

Looking back, I realise that music was how I made sense of identity. The world often likes reductive labels. Everything must be this or that, from here or from there. But music never asked me to choose. I could hear the same kind of longing in a Baroque passage that I heard in a raga, the same devotion in a Sufi chant that I felt in a Mass by Bach. Music allowed me to see that people, at their core, are asking the same enduring and often unspoken question about meaning and purpose, no matter where they come from. And those answers often lie beyond words, rationality, and quantification.

As I began composing my own work, this way of finding meaning through ‘hearing the world’ stayed with me. I don’t ‘fuse’ traditions. I try to let them speak to each other in the ways that they always have done in my own life. My music continues to grow out of that inner conversation, and out of trust that different world music traditions can coexist without losing their truth. Each tradition carries its own history and beauty, and when they converse, they illuminate one another.

Now, when I perform or compose, whether in Fez or Paris, Dubai or Amsterdam, I’m still following that same instinct I had as a child. I’m listening for what connects us. In qawwali, flamenco, Sufi chants, or orchestral works, I hear a shared human desire to reach beyond ourselves, to understand and be understood, to touch what gives life meaning.

Music has always been a bridge for me. First, it bridged the inner worlds of a child seeking to understand life. Then it bridged cultures, histories, and ideas that others might see as separate. Today, I believe it can offer a bridge where words often fail, a bridge to deeper connection, to empathy, to recognition of one another. If music taught me anything early on, it’s that within the rich beauty of our many diverse expressions, there is a shared human voice. And sometimes a single melody can touch us in a way that reveals where the bridge has been all along.