From the damn-near-perfect record label Canary Records’ Bandcamp site:
“Keçaçioğlu Muhammad was the stage name of Muhammad Mashadi Khalil oglu who was born June 18, 1864 in the city of Shusha in the mountainous region of the Russian Empire known to the overwhelming Armenian majority of its residents for centuries as Artsakh and is now called Karabakh, a region a little larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island and a little smaller than the Canadian city of Calgary but deeply significant to both ethnic groups. (The broader Baku region had been ceded by Qajar Iran to Russia in the Russo-Persian wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28.) A member of the city’s Azeri minority, Muhammed studied the traditional classical mugham forms under Kharrat Gulu (b. 1823; d. 1883), who trained several of the most significant mugham singers of the 19th century and helped make Shusha a cradle of not only Armenian but also Azerbaijani culture. Muhammed also studied under Mashadi Isi and later became a teacher himself. He traveled widely, performing both complex mugham repertoire, especially the drivingly rhythmic and strongly pulsed zarbi mughams (including the patriotic “Qarabag Shikatesi,” named for his native region), and lighter tasnif songs at musical gatherings, weddings, and concerts at the G.Z. Tagiyev theatre in Baku. He is said to have made his recordings in Warsaw and Kiev in 1912 and 1914, respectively. Earlier dates circulate widely, but we have not seen certain discographical data. The performances presented here appear to have been made for the Warsaw-based Sport Rekord label, some 2,000 miles from his home, and were transferred for LP release around 1990 by engineers at the former Soviet state label Melodiya, who were under the impression that they were recorded in 1906. Even after much work on the sound, we do not recommend them for headphone listening.“
