Botir Zokirov

Botir (Batyr) Karimovich Zokirov was born on 26 April 1936 in Moscow, where his parents — the opera baritone Karim Zokirov, later a People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR, and the singer Shohista Saidova — were studying at the Uzbek opera studio. He was the eldest of six children; his sister Luiza and his brothers Naufal, Farrukh, Jamshid and Ravshan also went on the stage, and the family became known in Uzbek music as the Zokirov dynasty.

In the early 1950s he studied singing at the Tashkent Conservatory, but a lung disease made him give it up, and in 1958–1962 he studied stage direction at the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. He took part in founding the youth pop ensemble Yoshlik (“Youth”) and performed with it at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957. There he first sang, in Arabic, the Egyptian composer Farid al-Atrash’s song “Ya zahratan fi khayali”; released by Melodiya as “Arabic Tango”, it made him famous throughout the Soviet Union.

From 1958 to 1970 Zokirov was a soloist and later the artistic director of the State Estrada Orchestra of Uzbekistan. Besides Uzbek folk songs and romances and songs by Mutal Burhonov, Ikrom Akbarov and Sayfi Jalil, he sang Indian, Iranian, Arabic, French and Italian songs, usually in the original language. In November 1964, at 28, he was named People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR. In the early 1960s he underwent lung surgery and was barred from singing for a time; in those years he translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” and Evgeny Schwartz’s play “The Shadow” into Uzbek. In 1966 he sang at the Olympia in Paris.

In 1972 Zokirov founded the Tashkent Music Hall and remained its artistic director, stage director and lead singer until 1978; its best-known production was the musical “The Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor”, staged together with Mark Zakharov. From 1978 he performed as a soloist of Uzbekkontsert, including with Yalla, the band led by his brother Farrukh.

Zokirov wrote poems, short stories and essays, and the libretto of Ikrom Akbarov’s opera “So‘g‘d elining qoploni” (“The Leopard of Sogdiana”). As a painter he is known for works such as “Self-Portrait”, “Saraton”, “Domes”, “The Street of Childhood” and “Chor Minor”. He also acted in films: “When Roses Bloom” (1959), the television series “Fiery Roads”, as Rabindranath Tagore, and Elyor Ishmukhamedov’s “The Youth of Genius” (1982), as Abdullah, the father of Avicenna. His first marriage, to the actress Erkli Malikbayeva, produced two sons, Bakhtiyor (the actor who played Avicenna in the same film) and Bahodir; his second, to the ballet dancer Galina, a daughter, Rukhshona.

Botir Zokirov died in Tashkent on 23 January 1985 and was buried at the Chigatai cemetery. A street in Tashkent, an arts college in Jizzakh and a youth arts centre in Samarkand bear his name; a contest of pop singers named after him has been held since 1989, and the Botir Zokirov Foundation was set up in 1995. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Outstanding Merit (Buyuk xizmatlari uchun, 2000) and the El-yurt hurmati order (2021), and on 16 May 2024 a monument to him was unveiled on the Tashkent street that bears his name.