How many people can say that they have a friend who has a won a Grammy?
My friend Abraham Gumroyan, or Abo, won the award for Best Tropical Album at this year’s Grammys, as a member of the Pacific Mambo Orchestra.
Abraham Gumroyan
Most members of our community, however, have probably not heard his name, because even though Abo is very vocal about topics ranging from Armenian politics to life in the diaspora, he is not the kind of a guy who will walk down the street announcing that he just won a Grammy. So I, as a proud friend, am doing it for him.
I first met Abo at an Armenian festival at Oakland’s St. Vartan Armenian Church. At that time, I was a student at Berkeley and he was finishing his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory. While dancing shalakho to the tunes of Harout Pamboukjian, I could not tell that this guy, who was dancing and pouring his heart and soul on the dance floor, was a classically trained bassist who had toured the world with everyone from Luciano Pavarotti to Justin Timberlake.
Abo was then playing for the San Francisco and Oakland East Bay Symphonies and giving master class lessons to local high school students. Sometimes, after a concert, he would make his way down to Berkeley, still wearing his white shirt and black bowtie and carrying his bass, which was taller than him, to our little apartment. There, we would spend the night around a game of belote, talking about the far-away land that was our homeland while the smoke from the hookah clouded the air. Not for a second did my friends and I feel that we were in the presence of a world-class musician who had accomplished so much while we were still fresh university students. He was always one of us, always a phone call away at any time of the day.
Often we talked about how great it would be if he could take his expertise, go to Armenia, and perform or pass his skills on to young Armenian musicians. In these troubling times of lawlessness in our homeland and the state of confusion and search for identity in the diaspora, there is a need for such role models who are exceptional in their craft and have the potential to put our collective name out there under a positive light.
The reason I wrote this piece was not to tell people how great of a friend or how gifted of a person Abo is, but to point out that in this period—when most of the airtime on diasporan Armenian television networks is filled with realtors and insurance salesmen, and when newspapers mainly cover political intrigues and various organizational news—culture often gets pushed to the second plane and the bright lights among us sometimes go unnoticed, when in reality they deserve all the notice.
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