When Arik Grigoryan began music school in Armenia at 7 years old, rock wasn’t part of the Soviet curriculum.
“I played mostly classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart,” said 40-year-old Grigoryan, a vocalist and composer who also plays the flute and guitar.
Outside of music school, though, Grigoryan was passionate about rock music. His father introduced him to American artists like Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, as well as the British rock band Jethro Tull, which became his biggest influence early on.
Specifically, Grigoryan was drawn to the way that the band featured the flute — for him, it became a “magical instrument.”
At age 9, he met Narek Barseghyan and Arman Kocharyan, who shared his musical sensibilities, and they began playing together. Barseghyan’s and Kocharyan’s parents were some of the original members of The Bambir, one of Armenia’s most-popular rock bands. It was founded in the late ’70s in Gyumri, widely known as the “city of artists.”
Today, The Bambir remains one of the most well-known bands in the country. Grigoryan and his friends started performing with the band in their late teens. By their early 20s, they inherited the band, blending together traditional Armenian music with rock and other genres.
In 2005, this generation of The Bambir released its first album, “B.B.R.”
One song, “Kikos,” is themed around a character in an Armenian fairy tale. It was the band’s first hit song.
Grigoryan said that he’s leaned on traditional Armenian music as a source of inspiration, reflected in the song, “Khio.”
“It’s a kind of rhythm — it’s an Armenian traditional song when people made butter, churning butter, during this movement, they started to sing the song,” Grigoryan said.
After their music started gaining popularity, Grigoryan began making money and started to feel like music could be his profession. But money, he said, was never the motivation behind the music.
“We are doing this job because we like music,” he said. “If we don’t have money, I think, we are not going to stop to playing music, because every man should create something … so, that is the first important thing for me.”
Grigoryan said that he and his peers have lived through a tumultuous period in Armenian history — including a major earthquake that rattled the country in 1988, the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Now, Armenia faces new challenges, new wars and new political pressure, which makes it difficult for him to focus on music.
“Living in this environment is very, I don’t know, it’s crazy. So, people who are doing music and who are doing art in this environment, they are already heroes,” he said.
The Bambir is still performing and producing new music. But in recent years, Grigoryan has also been teaching music at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies.
He formed a band called TmbaTa, made up of his music students. As one of his most-meaningful projects, he said, it inspires him to keep creating. After all, for Grigoryan, that’s what life is all about.