By Shahrokh Mortazavi
Mountain View, California
Vigen Fan # 42,245,456
December 1996
The Iranian
I think it was an overcast Tuesday night. JJ had stopped by my place and we were on our way to the famous "Cafe Abu ReyhAn-e Birooni" in Menlo Park, California, for some of their incredibly delicious tiramisu & Earl Grey tea (okay, I'll confess, and for some "eye-grazing" too). The real name of the establishment is Cafe Borone, but through the years it has transfigured into "Cafe Birooni" amongst Iranians...
Anyway, before taking off, I asked JJ to listen to an "unusual" Vigen tune from the 60s. I played the CD for him and he immediately asked me if he could borrow it. I guess the tune must have made an impression on him... Soon after he told me that it would be perfect for the next issue of The Iranian and asked if I could provide some background information on it.
As a fan of Iranian pop music of the 60s and 70s,
I always try to buy whatever I can get my hands on, searching particularly
for gems that were released before I was born, or ones that I missed when
I left Iran at a young age. 
In
a way, the music of this era has become somewhat of an umbilical cord that
connects me to my homeland and it continuously reminds me of the fact that
my native language is beautiful Persian, and not English! God knows how
much worse my already poor Persian would be if I didn't listen to those
songs every day... (btw, is eesAr with a sin, sAd or sey-e se noghteh???).
Yeah, the recordings may not be as clean by today's standards, but to me, even those little scratches bring back special memories -- for example those little "Fiat 1000" taxis with the portable record players, with pictures of Jamileh and funny stickers like "Beemeh bA abol-fazl" stuffed underneath the vinyl covering its doors. You could always count on hearing a good Vigen tune (albeit scratchy) when going from Tajreesh to Meydoon-e Vanak.
Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot of detailed info about this particular song, but here's what I managed to dig up. For starters, the song isn't actually Iranian! Back then it wasn't too uncommon to put words on foreign tunes and release them. Anyone remember Googoosh's "Abeli, Abeli, Abeli, in lAhAf"? ("I believe, I believe, I believe in love", with a slight accent). I suppose the lack of international copyright laws encouraged this practice somewhat.
You might be surprised to learn that various foreign artists have also taken Iranian tunes and sung them. Yes, really! For example, the song "SoltAn-e GhalbhA" by Anooshiravan Rohani has been sung by several artists in several languages. So has "MordAb" by Hassan Shamai'zAdeh/AradalAn SarfarAz. I'm sure you might be a little bit skeptical about this, so here's some proof! The picture below is from an album by a Swedish singer by the name of Gina Jacobi who sang Googoosh's "kieh kieh" (by Shamai'zAdeh/SarfarAz):
The words on the right hand side are in Persian ("posht-e divAr-e delam, yeh sedAy-e pA miyAd..."), but she actually sings the song to Swedish words, also included on a different page in the CD insert...
At any rate, "AsemAn-e Abi" is an Italian song written in the early sixties by a guy named Fred Buscaglione. The name of the song is "Love in Portofino". Portofino is a little harbour town, on the Ligure sea, 20-30 Km southeast of Genoa. Interestingly enough, the first line of this Italian song is in English, while the rest of it are in Italian. Here's the intro verse:
