Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors for a long time. And then, somewhere in the third track or the fifth, you notice that the poem is still there. Rumi, Saadi, Sheikh Bahāʾī, carried in her body from Tehran to Paris, then put into this studio configuration. The melody has transformed; the poem has not moved.
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