(b Sanandaj [Sina], Iran, 21 June 1955). Kurdish singer and composer. He began singing Kurdish songs at the age of 11. His first public performance a few years later established him as a singer, and by the late 1970s he had appeared on local television. He was jailed for performing political and nationalist Kurdish songs just before and after the 1979 Iranian revolution and later joined the Kurdish autonomist movement as a peshmarga (freedom fighter). Living in ‘liberated areas’, he began composing political songs and performing to live audiences and on clandestine radio stations. In 1984 Razzazi, his wife Marziya Fariqi (also a singer) and their children resettled as refugees in Sweden; he continued to perform in the expanding Kurdish diaspora and on the first Kurdish satellite television channel, Med-TV, which was launched in Britain in 1995.
By early 2000 Razzazi had composed about 60 songs, including the first Kurdish birthday song, Be Pîroz, and had produced 33 cassette tapes and four compact discs. Most of these recordings were goranî, popular songs of love, dance, political struggle and entertainment. He is one of the few singers to perform in different dialects of Kurdish. During the 1990s he conducted research on Kurdish music and musicians as well as teaching Kurdish in Swedish schools, translating and writing on Kurdish topics.
Raziyane, Pars Video 640 (1992)
Niyaz, Pars Video 707 (1993)
Payiz, Rawand Music (1995)
S. Blum and A. Hassanpour: ‘“The Morning of Freedom Rose Up”: Kurdish Popular Song and the Exigencies of Cultural Survival’, Popular Music, xv (1996), 325–43
AMIR HASSANPOUR, STEPHEN BLUM