Search - Folk Music Ensemble :: Traditional Music from Turkey

Historical music ala Turca

Dr. Jeff Clausel | Laramie, WY, lately of Cairo, Egypt | 08/08/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"If you are (as many of us Americans are) a lazy, uncurious creature of musical habit who thinks that Led Zeppelin or Perry Como were the pinnacle of Western musical creation, this CD may not be for you. This is a delightful but hard-working slice of some of the best of Turkish traditional music, the stern but evocative brother of "mehter," i.e., ancient Turkish military music---if there was ever a musical form that ennobled killing and war, that must have been Mehter, which can still be heard live by a period-piece band at the National Military Museum in Istanbul. Turkish music is a part of our Western musical heritage, like it or not, and is in the bloodline of forms that we would recognize more readily, such as "Asia Minor Blues" (elegant and stately modern Greek and Turkish blues forms that would embarrass Western bluesmasters such as Eric Clapton with their pathos and beautiful irony, and especially their ability to just make you sadden right up as they speak simply and straight from the heart). This is an album for the ear willing to learn and the ear interested in music history, and it takes Westerners a little time to learn to listen to the rhythms and instruments that at first startle us...but later they come to fascinate us. It's also helpful to take the time to go find out a little about each song, especially why, for whom, what about; these songs often tell intriguing, ancient stories about human themes as timeless as Blind Willie Johnson's "Motherless Children.""