Kourosh Ghazvineh

Life and education

Kourosh Ghazvineh was born in 1982 in Sahneh, in Kermanshah province. As a child he began playing the santur (the Persian hammered dulcimer) with Nouzar Rezai, and from 1997 he turned to the classical Kurdish and Persian maqams for the tanbur (maqams being the traditional melodic pieces of the tanbur repertoire), concentrating on the repertoires of Master Taheri, Taher Yarveysi, Seyed Khalil Alinejad, Seyed Amrollah Shahebrahimi and Ali Akbar Moradi.

In his own words, he learned the maqam Sheykh Amiri of the Sahneh region, with the kalam (sacred hymn) of Sheykh Amir, from childhood in the jamkhaneh (the ritual gathering house of the Yarsan, the Kurdish mystical faith also known as Ahl-e Haqq) of his village, from two of the village’s kalam reciters: Seyed Khanmohammad Khani, known as Seyed Khami, and the late Seyed Khanmohammad Mohammadi, known as Seyed Khani.

Artistic career

Ghazvineh plays the tanbur and the santur and also sings. For four years he was resident composer at Radio Kermanshah, and he has performed with various music groups at festivals in Iran and abroad. In 2014 he toured France with the group “Agu Nur”, and in 2015 he took part in the Houdetsi festival on the island of Crete, Greece.

In 2017 he taught and gave concerts at the Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Houdetsi and on Rhodes, and in Houdetsi he performed with Ross Daly (lyra, a bowed string instrument) and Pedram Khavarzamini (tombak, the Persian goblet drum). That same year in Geneva, among others in the programme “Master Musicians from the East” at the Alhambra hall and at a Labyrinth festival night, he played together with Daud Khan Sadozai (rabab, a short-necked lute), Arsalan Hazrati (kamancheh, the Iranian spike fiddle) and Reza Samani (percussion), and he also gave a concert in Belgium. After the 2017 Kermanshah earthquake he organised charity concerts to help those affected.

In summer 2018, at the Müzikköyü workshop in Fethiye, Turkey, he performed the piece Lunar, composed by Ross Daly, with Ross Daly (tarhu, a bowed string instrument), Kelly Thoma (lyra), Efrén López (rabab) and Arsalan Hazrati. In summer 2019, as the trio “Tanbur Karvan” (Iran, Denmark, France), he improvised with Christian Sylvest Simonsen (Turkish tanbur) and Dorian Zavatta (clarinet) in an old church in Houdetsi.

In August 2023 he gave concerts in the south of France, among others at “Nay Art” and in the village church of Arras-en-Lavedan in the Pyrenees, where, with Shabnam Zamani singing and Rachel on cello, he improvised in the dastgah (one of the modal systems of Persian classical music) Nava on a poem by Forough Farrokhzad.

Ghazvineh also teaches music. According to the Labyrinth Musical Workshop, he teaches music in Rasht. He has also had students at the Golshan music academy, and in a video from 2023 a group of his students, directed by him, performs Ayin-e Mastan (“The Rite of the Enraptured”), composed by Seyed Khalil Alinejad.

Works

Ghazvineh has written a book on tanbur music, published in Kurdistan and Iraq. Among his compositions whose performances he has published on YouTube are:

• Ashoub (“Turmoil”), sung by Shabnam Zamani, performed with the “Mitos” orchestra at the Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Houdetsi (2018)

• Ma ra Divaneh Kardi (“You Made Me Crazy”), sung by Shabnam Zamani, performed with the band “Adore Collective” in Nuremberg, Germany (2018)

• Raz (“Secret”), which he practised with his students at the Golshan academy in 2019 and recorded in 2020 with Hossein Ghasemzadeh (ney, the reed flute, and santur)

• Gharantineh (“Quarantine”) and Boundless Music, among the pieces he composed during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 and performed with musicians from other countries, including Efrén López, Pedram Khavarzamini and Danai Loukidi

• Ahouaneh (“Gazelle-like”), for tanbur and cello, performed in the south of France (August 2023)

He has also played the tanbur for the stage play Yek Daqiqeh va Sizdah Sanieh (“One Minute and Thirteen Seconds”) (2017).