Bahar Movahed on WorldStreams
Host: Dari
Aired: Wednesday 5.16.2012 10:00-10:30 PM

Listen to the archived program.

Bahar Movahed was born in Tehran. She started learning music early while still a child by playing the piano. Later on, she learned how to play the Tanbour by taking formal lessons from Virtuoso Seyed Amrollah Shah Ebrahimi, albeit for a short period when she was a teenager. This is the time when she developed an interest in Kurdish and eventually Iranian vocal Radifs (repertory). Meanwhile, she started learning the Tar with Keyvan Saket and Mohamad Reza Ebrahimi and simultaneously had the honor to attend the vocal classes of Mrs. Parissa. This way, she began her serious vocal training in 1998.

Iranian singer Bahar Movahed gives a new voice to the music of the Kurds. Her new CD Goblet of Eternal Light was just released in April. Kurdish music wasn't the focus of Bahar's early training though... as a singing prodigy, she pursued the study of Persian classical and traditional music, winning acclaim for her remarkable control and very pure tone.

But she couldn't hold back her Kurdish side. So she she sought out Ali Akbar Moradi, a true master of the tanbur, which has a legacy reaching back more than five millenia. The result after several years of study is Goblet of Eternal Light, a haunting beautiful album of intertwined tanbur and vocals drawing on centuries of Kurdish musical and poetic traditions.

Visit Bahar's website.

 back to program archives