Mojtaba Mirzadeh

About Mojtaba Mirzadeh

Mojtaba Mirzadeh was a violinist, kamancheh player and composer from Kermanshah. He was one of the most distinctive violin voices in Iranian music and a key accompanist of Kurdish song. He was born on 18 March 1946. English Wikipedia names Ilam as his birthplace and Persian Wikipedia names Kermanshah, but both agree that he grew up in Kermanshah, where his family moved when he was a child. He came from a poor family, and he was still a teenager when he began working with Kermanshah Radio in 1960.

At Kermanshah Radio he played violin in the orchestra that accompanied the great Sorani singer Hassan Zirek, and he arranged several of Zirek's songs. Some accounts call the ensemble Mirzadeh's own orchestra. Zirek's Kermanshah recordings are often counted among the finest of his career, and Mirzadeh's violin is part of their sound. Mirzadeh also composed, arranged and played a Kurdish lullaby sung by Mazhar Khaleqi.

In 1967 he moved to Tehran, where he played violin with the Barbod, Nakisa and Farabi orchestras. He became a sought-after arranger of traditional, folk and pop music, including songs for Hayedeh. He scored more than forty films, among them Dar Emtedade Shab (1978). His improvised violin playing survives on albums such as Raz-e Gol (1994) and Mast-e Eshgh with the singer Golpa. He died on 17 July 2005, aged 59.

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