Richard Hagopian Ensemble

Richard Hagopian is widely regarded as America’s foremost player of the oud, the round-bodied lute at the heart of Armenian music, and in 1989 he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts — the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. As a teenager, his mother took him to Los Angeles to study with one of the most eminent oud players of his generation, and through that training Richard absorbed the pre-genocide Ottoman Armenian repertoire he has spent his life preserving. In 1974, he launched Kef Time at Fresno’s Rainbow Ballroom, all-night dances built around live music for traditional Armenian line dancing that packed the historic venue for over a decade and became a defining institution for Armenian communities nationwide. After a stint performing the same music in Las Vegas, Richard moved his young family back to the San Joaquin Valley, where he ran a delicatessen for 36 years before retiring to the family farm.

His son Harold began studying Armenian music with his father at age five and went on to train at Juilliard, mastering the kanun, clarinet, and classical violin; he later founded the Traditional Crossroads record label and became a Grammy-nominated producer of Middle Eastern music. Richard’s grandsons, Philip and Andrew, grew up immersed in the same tradition, tapping out rhythms on the dumbeg and picking up the oud at home and at community celebrations, and each apprenticed formally with their grandfather through the Alliance for California Traditional Arts — Philip in 2006 on oud technique, Andrew in 2011 on kanun. Together, the brothers founded the Kef Time Legacy Band to carry the tradition into a new generation, reviving the all-night dance parties their grandfather started and drawing packed houses of dancers young and old back to the floor.

He will be joined on stage by Jim Karagozian on kanun, Jonathan Chardukian on bass guitar, and his grandson Philip Hagopian on the drum and oud.