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55 albums · 1955–2023

Music of Iran, from Shajarian and the radif to Googoosh, Kourosh Yaghmaei, Mohsen Namjoo and today

· 1 min read · by 1001 Albums

Googoosh singing on a lit stage with her band behind her and the crowd in front
An ensemble with tar, oud, kamancheh and drums on the wooden stage of Roudaki HallA musician sitting on a stool among trees in autumn, playing a setar
Googoosh in concert at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, 2006. Photo: Bahman from Toronto, Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · The Avan band on the stage of Roudaki Hall in Tehran, 2015. Photo: Arashk rp2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · The setar player Ehsan Naseri in a wood in northern Iran. Photo: Mostafa Meraji, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Iran's music runs from the radif, the old repertoire of the dastgah that Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, Parviz Meshkatian, Hossein Alizadeh and Kayhan Kalhor played in Tehran and the world, and the Golha radio programme of Banan, Delkash and Marzieh, to the pop of the seventies with Googoosh, Farhad and Kourosh Yaghmaei, the Los Angeles years of Ebi, Dariush and Hayedeh, the bakhshis of Khorasan, the Bandari of the Gulf coast, Ali Akbar Moradi's tanbur from Kermanshah, and since the nineties Mohsen Namjoo, Kiosk, O-Hum, Mohsen Yeganeh, Zedbazi, Shahin Najafi, Niyaz and Sevdaliza. The list has 55 records from 1955 to 2023, one or two by each name and only a small part of what they made; most of the radif, the religious chant, the music of most regions and the many cassettes of the eighties and nineties are left for other lists. About 48 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Pop 16%Classical 9%Rock 7%Other 68%
  • Pop 16%
  • Classical 9%
  • Rock 7%
  • Other 68%

The genres named most: iranian, pop, persian classical, rock, persian song, folk.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 1 country: Iran 55. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Countries first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.