Left, Dilber Ay; proper, Büşra Pekin within the title function of the 2022 film.
Flying on Turkish Airlines, to comply with the security video (Trailer for a thriller) and a dodgy dervish film (observe right here), I’m additionally grateful to them for introducing me to arabesk [1] singer Dilber Ay (1956–2019), topic of a current biopic (Ketche, 2022) that captivated me, even with out subtitles. Here’s a trailer with German subtitles:
Dilber Ay was introduced up in a Yörük-Kurdish tribe of Kahramanmaraş province, south Turkey. Her household migrated north to Ankara after which Düzce, the place she was found by TRT scouts on the age of 13. Constantly abused by the hands of males, her story chimes in with what appears to be a dominant style in Turkish cinema. This interview probably reads higher in Turkish, however you get the gist…
Like a lot of probably the most transferring music world wide (see e.g. beneath flamenco, or the Matthew Passion), Dilber Ay’s music expresses anguish—usually stressing the theme of imprisonment, as in her Flash TV collection Kadere Mahkûmları (Prisoners of destiny, 2011–15). It’s all the time the plaintive gradual laments that captivate me, usually with beautiful free-tempo taksim preludes on violin. Two songs featured within the movie:
Among her different songs,
- Barak havasi, with additional contributions on zurna:
For extra anguish, strive Songs of Asia Minor, and Some Kurdish bards, beneath West/central Asia: a roundup.
[1] I featured İbrahim Tatlıses beneath The name to prayer. On the altering arabesk scene, Izzy Finkel’s instructive BBC radio programme “Istanbul’s factory of tears” (2019) contains contributions from varied singers and producers, in addition to Martin Stokes, writer of The arabesk debate (1992).
