The majority of music we listen to falls within certain set parameters that we can accept and appreciate. Folk music does this, rap music does that, and blues sounds like this. We use that understanding as a means of defining our experience depending on how well what is being listened to lives up to our expectations of how we think something is supposed to sound.

That system of appreciation works only until we leave the familiar behind and approach a creation that exists beyond the boundaries we recognize. Our frame of reference has been taken away and we have no context to place the piece musically. In some ways, I find this allows one to make a truer evaluation of the work because you are forced to listen for the intent behind the music instead of how well they have worked within a structure.

At least, that's what I tell myself (or something like it anyway, nobody really talks like that — especially to themselves) when I'm faced with something I've never heard before and is completely unfamiliar in style and type. It’s the kind of thing that I find both exciting and challenging to review because I'm flying by the seat of my pants while getting to hear music that I don't normally have the opportunity to hear and that has the potential for opening up a new world of sound.

Such was the case with Azam Ali's latest CD Elysium For The Brave. Prior to reading her press release, I had never heard of her or her music. I have already been intrigued by the music of the Middle East, or music derived from that region. I know very little about it, and specifically know very little about the music of Azam Ali's homeland Iran so was interested in hearing more.

It turns out I'll have to wait a little longer to learn about music from Iran, because Azam's influences stretch far beyond the borders of her homeland. She was already living abroad before the revolution and her mother decided she didn't want to raise her daughter in that society so they remained in exile.

Her formative schooling was at an international boarding school in India and in 1985 she moved to the United States where she began her formal education in music. The first instrument that she learned, ironically enough, was from her homeland, the Persian santour – a type of hammered dulcimer. But it was her voice that would become her true instrument, and her education expanded to include Western classical, Indian, Persian, and Eastern European vocal music.