Tigran was born in Qamishli in northeastern Syria to an Armenian family originally from Diyarbakır, Turkey.

[4] After finishing ninth grade, he concentrated his efforts on learning music and playing Oud[2] and in 1953 he gave his first public concert at the Newroz celebrations.

[4] By the age of twenty years, he was singing in four languages: Kurdish, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian.

[7] In 2009 he was able to visit the villages, where his parents grew up in the Ottoman Empire (present day Turkey), where he was welcomed in Diyarbakır[3] and gave a concert at the Newroz celebrations in Batman.

[9] Tigran wanted to be buried in Diyarbakır in Turkey,[10] an aim supported by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP),[3] but the Turkish Ministry of the Interior refused this request,[8][11] on grounds that he was not a Turkish citizen.