42nd Studio, North Hollywood — an oral history from the X DOT 25 Music production files
The vocals for these sessions were captured and mixed by Yousef Shahab, a legendary figure in Persian music engineering who had tracked the definitive records for Googoosh and Ebi in Iran before emigrating. The room was 42nd Studio in North Hollywood, then owned by Farhad Zamani, originally of Rasht.
Shahab engineered much of the early X DOT 25 catalog — Songs of the Enchanted for Parinaz, Moondance for Kamel Alipour, Bandidos De Amor for Yussi & Django, and, most celebrated of all, the critically acclaimed Beyond Denial by Axiom of Choice.
Midway through the primary repertoire, Zoroofchi asked whether he could cut a piece that had not been part of the orchestral material tracked in Baku — Chal Ashigh. It happened because another of the label’s artists was already in the building: the master Persian instrumentalist Kamel Alipour was at 42nd Studio working on recordings of his own, and being there and available was enough to make the session possible. Alipour had trained under the grand master Ali Akbar Shahnazi alongside his classmate Hossein Alizadeh. The story, as Alipour himself used to tell it, was that their Ustad always called on him to demonstrate pieces on the tar in front of the class — which, he would add with some relish, once famously annoyed the young Alizadeh.
No Persian tar could be found in the studio. Yaqub said he had an instrument in his car and went to fetch it — an Azerbaijani tar, smaller than its Persian counterpart and played against the chest. Alipour played a few notes, turned to him, and said:
“Man, your tar also has a
torki accent.”
— torki is the word Iranians use for Azerbaijani — not the language of Türkiye.
Finding it too light to carry the weight of the song, Alipour went back to his own car for his Persian setar, and they cut the track — an unplanned fusion of Azerbaijani vocal opera and classical Persian improvisation. When Zoroofchi stepped out of the booth he had tears in his eyes:
“Wow, I hit the highest note I ever sang in my lifetime on this song.”
He had touched the absolute ceiling of his range, and it was preserved only because the session left room for spontaneity. Hear the recording ▶ — the setar behind him is Alipour’s.
Two rooms, two sounds. The catalogue carries both halves of that history. The orchestral material was tracked in Baku — sweeping, 120-piece, recorded at scale. The 42nd Studio sessions are the opposite: dry, close, immediate, an expatriate room in North Hollywood with the singer an arm’s length from the glass. The contrast between the Baku strings and that tears-in-the-booth vocal proximity is the character of these recordings, and the remasters were made to preserve it rather than polish it away.
The third album. Before the pandemic, the label and Zoroofchi were mapping out a third collaboration — a grand symphonic and visual tribute to his lifelong idol, Rashid Behbudov, built from the Azerbaijani classical and folk standards Behbudov had famously performed with full orchestral backing, with a dedicated series of music videos. Production halted when Zoroofchi contracted the virus in Baku. He died a couple of weeks later, in September 2021. The final text messages and calls remain in the label’s archives — a record of an unfinished masterpiece.
