“Ardor” is the last of ten pieces on The Song of the Phoenix, a debut album that follows the phoenix of The Conference of the Birds through the lament it sings on a pyre of its own making, the fire and the young bird that rises from the ashes. Attar of Nishapur, the Persian Sufi mystic who wrote that poem in the 12th century, makes the phoenix’s song the origin of all music. MEHRNAVAA, a Flemish quartet of two Iranian and two Belgian musicians, released “Ardor” on 20 June as the album’s first single, the same day they premiered the programme in the old refectory of Ghent’s St Bavo’s Abbey. A second single, “Ashes, Silence and Rise of the Light”, followed in September, ahead of the album’s release on 16 October through Ghent label Zephyrus Records.

Tehran-born Shahab Azinmehr wrote the song’s words and music; trained in tar and setar in Iran, he now lives in Belgium and performs in Jordi Savall’s Orpheus XXI ensemble. Farnoosh Khodadadeh, an Iranian daf player who made Ghent her home, prepared the album’s texts and translations with the Flemish actor and writer Josse De Pauw. Seraphine Stragier trained as a cellist at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and also plays harp and yayli tambur, a bowed long-necked lute from Turkey. Nathan Daems brings his saxophone over from Black Flower, the Belgian band he leads, which has spent more than a decade working Ethiopian scales into jazz and records for Zephyrus too.

Two of the song’s instruments come from the same Sufi tradition as Attar’s poem: the setar, a small Persian lute played with the index fingernail, owes its fourth string to the 18th-century dervish Moshtaq Ali Shah, while the daf is the broad frame drum of Iranian Sufi gatherings, its metal rings rattling inside the rim on every stroke.

The quartet takes the programme round Flanders from CC Asse on 29 October to Schouwburg Noord in Antwerp’s Merksem district on 21 February 2027, with a stop at Mechelen’s Predikherenkerk on 12 November.

Stream “Ardor” HERE and get your copy of The Song of the Phoenix through THIS LINK