Tara Jaff

Tara Jaff is a self-taught Kurdish musician originally from Halabja, Kurdistan of Iraq, and has been living in the UK since 1976.

Over the years, she experimented with different string instruments but her fascination for the ancient harps of Mesopotamia, led her to the contemporary Celtic harp. Embracing this instrument, she introduced it to Kurdish music, developing her own unique style of playing.

She has given many performances mainly as a solo artist and occasionally with other music groups all over the world.

She released her first solo album, Dilley Dewanem (My Restless Heart) in 2005 in Turkey which was a collection of Kurdish folk songs.

Along with Fran Hazelton and June Peters she founded Zipang, a storytelling group which focuses on stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She also participated in the London Kurdish Film Festival (2007), the Istanbul Film Festival (2011) and more recently the Kurdish Film Festival in Rome (2013) where she improvised live to the screening of the silent black and white film Zare (Armenia 1926).

More recently a new album has been released in the UK, "Asewar", which is an instrumental project in collaboration with Fardin Lahourpour on the Nay and Percussion and Somayeh Abbasi on the Tonbak.

This was initially released in Tehran, Iran in 2012 under the name of Dialogue of Harp and Nay.

Her music has been used in several films about Kurdish issues.

For five years until 2011 she played music in several hospitals in London and was featured in a BBC documentary about the subject.

Homepage: http://tarajaff.com