Saxophone Professor Hafez Modirzadeh Inspires Jazz Musician

JAZZ TIMES -- “The musicians I was meeting kept saying, ‘You should get in touch with Hafez Modirzadeh. Everything you’re saying, he’s said.’” The Iranian American alto saxophonist, who teaches at nearby San Francisco State University, became a new mentor for Batish. “He showed me that these systems can coexist, and that it’s up to us to take this piano hammer and detune it — but think of it as a retuning. It’s a movement toward recalibrating our minds and how we think of tones. Just that feeling of agency over the instrument feels like a way to decolonize my mind, and therefore hopefully the music.”