Faramarz Aslani

Faramarz Aslani was the tender voice that set Persian hearts to music, a singer, guitarist, and songwriter whose songs became the shared memory of a generation. Born in Tehran and educated at London University's College of Journalism, he began as a writer before the President of CBS in Tehran discovered him. His 1977 debut, Occupation of the Heart, has never left the best-seller lists, and on a later album he laid melodies beneath eight ghazals of Hafez, Iran's beloved mystic poet. All of this flows naturally from a Sun in Cancer, the father shining through the sign of the mother: a deeply feeling, sentimental heart, the crab guarding something soft inside its shell, forever bound to home, homeland, and the ache of memory. Of his last songs he said they were "the addition of all the sweet and bitter memories of my life", pure Cancer, where love and happiness are one thing. His Moon in Sagittarius carried the wanderer who finds peace only on the open road; after 1979 he took his family to England and later to America, teaching a scattered people through song, philosophising in melody. He died in Maryland in 2024, aged sixty-nine, his voice a homeland his listeners could always return to.