Episode 005: One Body, Many Strings with Maz Karandish

Maz Karandish grew up in Orange County, the youngest of four in a family of musicians and poets from Shiraz. At four he was made to learn the violin and hated it. At six, in a tea house in Iran, he heard a man playing the ney. "I just started crying. I started bawling." His mother got him ney lessons, and took him to therapy, worried about a six-year-old moved so deeply by something so sad.

Both halves of that story became his life. He studied North Indian classical music as a disciple for years, took up the setar and the oud, found meditation at eighteen and lived as a part-time monk through college, then spent a decade playing festivals. He also earned a PhD in psychology. Today he sees therapy clients Tuesday to Thursday and flies out Thursday night to play electronic sets built on Persian and Indian instruments under the name Mah Ze Tar, strings of the moon. "I'm a fusion," he says. "I can't do one thing, it turns out."

In this episode of Del be Del, I sit down with Maz Karandish for a long, unhurried conversation about holding more than one identity in one body: Persian and American, musician and psychologist, the teenager who rejected his culture and the man who now works to preserve it.

We talk about the particular loneliness of the immigrant kid who could not ask his parents about high school ("I had to figure things out on my own") and what it took to keep the poetry and the music while walking away from the rest.

We go deep on cultural appropriation, a question he has clearly lived with: "the line between appropriation and appreciation is education and naming."

He plays. The ney, the sitar, the Persian setar, the oud. He explains how the Indian sitar was born from the Persian setar in the Mughal courts, and he shows me the instrument he designed, the Mah Ze Tar, which carries three traditions on a single bridge.

We talk about the two lives ("my clients do not know about my music"), about where meaning comes from when your job is to bring the party, and we end on home: the Shiraz he has not seen in 25 years, and the Redwoods where he lives now. "My nervous system feels so right."

"We're not born with a manual," Maz says. For him, psychology was "learning the manual" of the mind. This episode is what that manual sounds like when a ney player reads it aloud.

Find Maz:

Website: https://mahzetar.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mahzetar

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MazKarandishMusic

Del be Del means "heart to heart" in Persian. This podcast is about honest, heartfelt conversations — the stories we live but rarely tell, and the conversations we don't have often enough.

If something in this conversation stayed with you, I'd love to hear about it. Leave a comment and tell me what resonated, who you'd like to hear from, or what you would have asked if you were sitting in this room. And if you'd like more conversations like this one, subscribe on YouTube or follow Del be Del on Spotify and Apple Podcasts — it's the best way to make sure the next conversation finds you.

Until next time — take care of your heart, and the hearts around you.

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