Seyed Teymour Mehrabi

Life and education

Seyed Teymour Mehrabi, son of Seyed Feyzollah, was born in 1954 in the town of Gahvareh. In the time of Nader Shah Afshar his forefather migrated from Qolleh-ye Zanjir to Gahvareh together with Malek Yasem Khan Guran, and is counted among the founders of this Yarsan town (the Yarsan are a Kurdish mystical faith). Tanbur playing, poetry, Shahnameh recitation (the Shahnameh is the Persian Book of Kings) and expertise in the kalams (the sacred hymns of the Yarsan) have been handed down in this family from generation to generation.

For this reason Seyed Teymour took up the tanbur in earnest and had the privilege of studying with great masters such as Agha Seyed Vali Hosseini and Agha Seyed Mahmoud Alavi.

Artistic career

Mehrabi has trained many tanbur students. He has taken part with distinction in Iran’s regional music festivals as a Shahnameh reciter and has won prizes there.

He has his own style of maqam singing (maqams are the traditional melodic pieces of the tanbur repertoire) and is one of the renowned figures of the tanbur. He has also composed more than 16,000 couplets of poetry in a language that has been called divine, an output unmatched of its kind.