About Us
Kourosh Zolani and Mohssen Behrad form a unique team. Mohssen is a successful inventor with a passion for improving the Santour. Kourosh is an accomplished composer and santour player with a long record of improving and modifying the original santour and creating a family of the chromatic santours. This extraordinary team created sanoutr-7-dastgah. This new instrument has solved many problems in the original santour, which had limited the composers and players for centuries.
Kourosh Zolani
Kourosh Zolani was born in a small village in Iran. He does not come from a background that encouraged him to become a musician; indeed, he comes from a small town where music was not a part of everyday life and was, in general, considered taboo.
Koroush studied Musical Composition at University of Art in Tehran and graduated from the Film Scoring program at the UCLA School of Entertainment. Also, Kourosh studied Santour under Master Faramarz
Payvar, the most influential and famous Santour player in Persian music history.
Kourosh invented a new method of tuning the Santour that revolutionized the ancient instrument by transforming it from an exclusively diatonic instrument to a chromatic. Later, He evolved his invention to the new levels designing a family of Chromatic Santours, which further expand the instrument’s realms of timbre and range.
Kourosh is the first Iranian musician to perform on the Chromatic Santour with a symphony orchestra, performing his original scores at venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and in the Roman city of Jerash in Jordan.
Kourosh has appeared as a guest lecturer at UCLA, California State University Long Beach, Pomona college, L.A. Trade Tech College and several other notable colleges and universities.
Kourosh’s published compositions have won numerous awards including:
L.A. Treasures Award, the 2003 Finalists in the USA Song Writing Competition in the World Music Category, Call to Arts Festival, JPF.
For more information visit www.kouroshzolani.com.
Mohssen Behrad
Mohssen Behrad was born in Tehran. He moved to Canada in 1990. He entered the 3-year dental technician program in Vancouver College and graduated with highest grades in the history of the college. Mohssen taught at the Vancouver community College for a while. Then he decided to pursue his passion for improving machines and devices and build up his career as an orthodontic technician. Later on, Mohssen invented several machines related to his field. He has numerous patents for his creative inventions.
Beside his technical world, Mossen is an artist and accomplished athlete. He sings and plays the ney, flute, clarinet, recorder and several other instruments as a hobby. Plus, he competes as a professional archer and has a black belt in judo.