Faraz Minooei
Born in Tehran, Faraz Minooei began playing the santour at the age nine. While studying with Mr. Behnam Mehrabi he found a deep spiritual desire to study music, an “unexplainable souvenir from the eternal truth”. A graduate from San Francisco State University, Faraz is a Nagle Scholar, and the only World/Jazz music major in Northern California, with Persian santour as his primary instrument. As a fulltime musician, Faraz is active in the fields of performance, composition, ethnomusicology, and teaching. He has been fortunate to continue his education in music – as a “never ending project” – with master musicians such as Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Hossein Omoumi, Royal Hartigan, and Hafez Modirzadeh. He is now continuing the path of music in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology as a graduate student in University of California, Irvine, while receiving the Graduate Diversity Fellowship. In late 2007 and early 2008, he has been invited from UCI, UCLA, and UCSC and Society of Ethnomusicology to give lectures and demonstrate the Iranian music on santour. Recipient of many scholarships and grants such as the Meet the Composer, he has a passion for understanding the intricacies of the human mind and the world around him and refers to “thinking” as his hobby.