Mohsen Namjoo, London

Mohsen Namjoo biography

Mohsen Namjoo (Persian: محسن نامجو) was born in 1976 in Torbat-e Jam, Iran. When he was one year old, his family moved to Mashhad where he spent the next seventeen years of his life. When he was 12 his father, Mohammad Hossein Namjoo, died. A few months later, his family encouraged him to start attending music classes. He started classical Persian vocal music with Ali Shakeri and solfège with Kaivan Alaee. Soon after, he got to know Ali Shakeri through Nasrollah Nasehpoor on a trip to Tehran. At that time, Ali Shakeri was a student of Nasrollah Nasehpoor. After almost a year of sessions with Ali Shakeri, Nasrollah Nasehpoor started to have weekly music sessions in Mashhad. This was a great opportunity for the young Namjoo to learn classical Persian vocal music from one of the most highly regarded masters of traditional Iranian singing. He attended these classes until the age of 18. In 1994 he was offered admission to study Music at University of Tehran. Since the music program at the university would not start for another year, he took two theater classes at the University of The Arts. Namjoo always recalls the two theater classes and that one year period of time to be the time which shaped many parts of his work and his life. At Tehran University he was a student of Alireza Mashayekhi and Azin Movahed and other masters. In 1997, Namjoo quit the music program in University of Tehran, later explaining that he had some conflicts with certain faculty in the music department because they wanted to put him through more years of traditional Iranian music practice which were the repetition of what he had already learned in the earlier years of his life.

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