New York Daily News, NY
Dec 7 2007

Family mourns death of Albert Asriyan

by Clem Richardson

A few days before he died, Albert Asriyan got a midday conference
call from his sisters, Elza Masumova and Ruzanna Akopjan, as the
three drove through Brooklyn in separate cars.

They told him to turn his radio to CD101.9 to catch a George Benson
tune.

"Albert was going to work, and after he got there, he said he was
going to sit in the car until the song ended," Masumova recalled this
week. "He had so much love for music. It was his heart and soul."

A classically trained musician, composer and arranger educated at the
Music Academy of Baku, the capitol of Azerbaijan, part of the former
Soviet Union, Asriyan could play anything from jazz to Paganini to
Persian, Georgian, Armenian, Russian and Gypsy folk tunes, said
friend and bandmate Boris Vishneukine, who has known Asriyan since
they were both 14 and studied together.

Jazz and other Western music was dear to him when he was young, even
though at the time, both were banned by the government. His wife,
Ivetta, said Asriyan was among those Soviet youth who found Western
music underground – and they both often listened to bootleg copies of
Benson, Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago records cut into the acetate
of old X-ray photographs.

"Sometimes, you could look through the record and see a broken arm or
leg," recalled Ivetta, who is also a musician and singer.

Asriyan would become a successful artist in his native Baku. He
performed for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and at the Bolshoi
Theatre. One of his many musical groups, Talisman, made the first
music video in that city, 1987’s "Kuvshin," or "Vase," said his
daughter, Julie.

Asriyan duplicated that success when the family moved to Moscow in
1989, and again when he and his extended family – including his
parents and in-laws – moved to New York in 1993.

He was a popular musician in the Russian, Jewish, Gypsy and Armenian
communities here – even though he was born in Baku, Asriyan was of
Armenian descent – and worked in cities across the U.S. and Europe.

He scored a short film, "A Moment of Silence," about genocide and
persecution in Armenia.

"He said he was fighting them [the government] with his music,"
Ivetta said. "He said he tried to stop it with his music since he
could not stop it in real life."

Asriyan was shepherding the emerging musical careers of daughters
Julie and Kristina, and kept up with current musical trends. Julie
recalled her father picking out notes on the piano while watching a
Chris Brown music video on MTV.

Then he was gone.

Returning to the family’s Sheepshead Bay home on Nov. 27, Asriyan
complained that his stomach hurt – family members said he had been
receiving treatment for back pain for more than six months.

After eating, he vomited and collapsed on the living room floor. Not
long after, an ambulance delivered him to Coney Island Hospital,
where doctors said there was not much they could do. His stomach
pains were actually final-stage leukemia. He was 56.

The death was so sudden that a local Russian-language newspaper
carried both his obituary and a review of a recent Asriyan
performance.

"When he was lying down in the house before we went to the hospital,
he said, in a joking manner, ‘Just in case I die, girls, I want you
to know I love you,’" Julie recalled as the family, dressed in black,
continued to mourn his passing this week.

"He told Kristina to take the microphone. Mom saw it as him passing
his musical legacy on to her."

The death marked the end of an amazing musical odyssey of a man who
found musical success on two continents.

"He had such an open heart," said Isabelle Khanuka, a singer who
worked with Asriyan at one of his last appearances. "He was beautiful
inside and out. When he played, you felt like he was speaking through
his violin."

Lev Yelisavetsky, a keyboardist who played with Asriyan in one of his
first Baku groups, Chaika, said, "You cannot mark the size of his
talent. We’ve lost a very good musician and a very kind man. He was
one of the most talented people in our community, without question."

Asriyan started taking accordion lessons when he was 4, but switched
to the violin after the aunt who was teaching him said he had the
right fingers for the instrument. "He had a better ear for music than
anyone else," Masumova said. "He had a gift that no one else had."

When Asriyan was 14, he was the first violinist in the Baku
Philharmonic Orchestra, playing at the Kremlin for Brezhnev and
making appearances at the Bolshoi Theatre and the Palace of Lenin,
his family said.

He was also forming bands, including Sevgilim Ashugs (Power of Love)
and another that translates to Girls of Baku. Future wife Ivetta was
one of the girls.

Vishneukine said he and Asriyan would roam around Baku, playing
wherever they could find people who would listen.

"No one paid us anything," Vishneukine said. "We’d play jazz,
national folk music, anything we could. We’d go to different cities.
… But what was most important was that people liked what we did."

Mounting tensions in Baku against ethnic Armenians prompted Asriyan
to move the family to Moscow in 1988, where he created popular bands
that toured Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also arranged and
appeared in another video, "Without You," for which Ivetta wrote the
lyrics.

In July 1993, the family followed sister Ruzanna to the U.S.,
settling first in Seagate, Brooklyn, with Vishneukine, who had come
to the U.S. years earlier. Their first stateside job was playing at
Kaukas, a now-defunct Brighton Beach nightclub.

Asriyan was on his way.

The family this week vowed to continue Asriyan’s musical legacy.

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