Keykhosrow Pournazeri

(born 28 May 1944, Kermanshah)

Composer, tanbur player and founder of the Shams Tanbur Ensemble

Life and education

Keykhosrow Pournazeri was born in 1944 in the “Barzeh-Damagh” neighbourhood of Kermanshah.

His father, Parviz Pournazeri (known as Haji Khan), was a student of Colonel Alinaghi Vaziri and Darvish Khan, and his mother, Pourandokht Sarhaddar, was the head of the Pourandokht High School and was regarded as the first woman in Kermanshah to earn a high-school diploma.

Pournazeri entered the world of music as a child through the tar (a long-necked Persian lute), and from his father he learned the radif, the core repertoire of Iran’s classical (dastgah) music, as well as the works of Vaziri.

He inherited his love of poetry and classical Persian literature from his mother, and he benefited from the company of poets such as Gholamreza Keyvan Samiei and Yadollah Behzad Kermanshahi.

He began his university studies in civil engineering, but after three years he gave them up because they did not suit his temperament, and moved to the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran to pursue music academically.

He then spent 12 years studying the history and culture of ancient Iran with Dr Gholamreza Dadbeh.

Artistic career

In 1972 he began working as a music expert at the Ministry of Culture and Art, collecting and reconstructing Kurdish and Iranian melodies. During this period he directed the ministry’s Kurdish and traditional orchestra.

The Shams Tanbur Ensemble

In 1980 Keykhosrow Pournazeri founded the Shams Tanbur Ensemble, a group that brought a new approach to mystical music and to ensemble playing on the tanbur.

His innovation of using the daf (frame drum) alongside the tanbur and of creating a polyphonic structure took the ritual music of Kermanshah into a new phase.

In terms of influence, Pournazeri’s work with the Shams Ensemble can be considered on a par with that of the Kamkars in Kurdish music.

Collaborations and major works

The first major work of the Shams Ensemble was the album Sedaye Sokhan-e Eshgh (“The Sound of Love’s Words”), sung by Shahram Nazeri;

it was an album that became a turning point in Iran’s mystical music.

In the years that followed, works such as Heyrani (“Bewilderment”), Motreb-e Mahtab-ru (“The Moon-Faced Minstrel”) and Mastan Salamat Mikonand (“The Enraptured Greet You”) also came out of Pournazeri’s collaboration with Nazeri and other artists.

In the 1990s, together with his sons Tahmoures and Sohrab Pournazeri, he expanded the Shams Ensemble and, with more than 300 concerts in Iran and around the world, introduced tanbur music to international audiences.

Selected albums

Among Keykhosrow Pournazeri’s works, the album Sedaye Sokhan-e Eshgh, with vocals by Shahram Nazeri (1983), is regarded as a turning point in Iran’s mystical music. It was followed by the album Heyrani (1996), with melodies drawn from Persian poetry and Kurdish music, which revealed a new side of his spiritual outlook.

In 1999 the landmark work Mastan Salamat Mikonand was released in collaboration with Bijan Kamkar and Najmeh Tajaddod and was widely acclaimed. After that, the albums Afsaneh-ye Tanbur (“The Legend of the Tanbur”, 2001), sung by Bijan Kamkar, and Nishtman (“Homeland”), with vocals by Najmeh Tajaddod and Neda Khaki, broadened his engagement with Kurdish music.

The albums Penhan Cho Del (“Hidden Like the Heart”, 2007), with vocals by Hamidreza Nourbakhsh, and Motreb-e Mahtab-ru, with the voice of Shahram Nazeri, are among the Master’s most brilliant collaborations of the 2000s.

In the 2010s, works such as Ghatreh-haye Baran (“Raindrops”) and Bar Sama-ye Tanbur (“To the Sama of the Tanbur”, sama being the Sufi ritual of listening and dance), sung by Alireza Ghorbani, were released, blending poems by Rumi and Partow Kermanshahi delightfully with the sound of the tanbur. His most recent collection, Az Davvar-e Charkh (“From the Turning of the Heavens”, 2018), reflects the experience and musical worldview of Keykhosrow Pournazeri in the maturity of his art.

International concerts

• Shams Ensemble and Homayoun Shajarian – Théâtre de la Ville, Paris (2019)

• Shams Ensemble and Homayoun Shajarian – Bozar festival, Belgium (2019)

• Fes Music Festival (FES), Morocco (2018)

• Konya Mystic Music Festival, Turkey (2018)

Today

Keykhosrow Pournazeri currently runs the Pournazeri Music Academy in Tehran.

His two sons, Tahmoures and Sohrab Pournazeri, are both leading figures of contemporary Iranian music and are continuing their father’s path in mystical and fusion music.