Tigran Hamasyan’s StandArt, his first album of American standards, was released one year ago tomorrow. To mark the anniversary, the pianist/composer has shared Night Odyssey, a short film by his sister Melanya Hamasyan that begins and ends with the album track “I Should Care,” written by Alex Stordahl, Paul Weston, and Sammy Cahn. He is joined on the track by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. You can hear the album here and watch the short film here:

Melania Hamasyan says: “In autumn of 2021, my brother proposed an idea to shoot a short film (as an alternative to a music video) inspired by a song from his most recent—still unnamed at the time—album. Of course I was immediately excited by the idea, and even more so when I discovered that the piece he was suggesting was ‘I Should Care,’ a composition which I had initially discovered and loved by the interpretation of the great Thelonious Monk. Another prospect for the project also interested me—that is, shooting the film in Armenia, which was something I had wanted to do.

“Hearing Tigran’s arrangement accompanied by the wonderful Ambrose Akinmusire (a collaboration I had had the pleasure to witness a few years back) provoked a complexity of images and emotions, which inspired the idea for the film. There was a contemporaneity I could hear in the interpretation—a postmodern breath which was all too relevant in the context of an Armenian winter, when the grey of the everyday seemed to be longer, deeper, and lonelier.

“In the outskirts of the capital, where I lived, was a landscape which was visually disorientating, a hybrid of the urban, industrial, and residential—chaos in disharmony reflecting our postmodern existence. Yet still within winter’s solitude, were visible the illuminated scenes of human presence. The film, Night Odyssey, became a search for meaning and the awakening from a perpetually disorienting chaos of our contemporary landscape.”