Cigdem Aslan

Singer Cigdem Aslan was born in Turkey, but has been part of London’s musical scene for several years, singing with the excellent klezmer and Balkan group She’Koyokh. But her debut solo album shows she’s a rising star and a truly sublime singer of rebetika — the gorgeous, melancholic music that came out of the Greek and Turkish resettlements of the 1920s. Aslan makes these songs, in Greek and Turkish, her own and has assembled a spectacular band of instrumentalists with sublime solos on clarinet, violin and kanun zither. The music is at turns ebullient, seductive and introspective. This isn’t just a great record from London musicians, but a release of international significance. - London Evening Standard

Just occasionally, a new artist emerges to throw old music styles into an intriguing contemporary perspective. Çiğdem Aslan is a young Turkish Kurd who was born in Istanbul, lives in London, and until now has been best known for her work with She'koyokh, the upbeat British klezmer band. Her first solo album, Mortissa, concentrates on rebetika, the bravely outspoken "Balkan blues" that flourished back in the early 1920s, the era of enforced mass population movements between Greece and Turkey. Performing these songs at the Vortex, where she gave three shows, she sounds like one of the best British-based discoveries of the year.

Her success is down to her reworking of the old songs with a blend of delicate soulful vocals, subtle theatrics and a stage persona that could switch from stately to slinky and flirtatious. Backed by a nine-piece band that included the bağlama, bouzouki and kanun along with clarinet, she switched between songs in Greek and Turkish (including one with a Turkish title but Greek lyrics) that explained the historic connection between the two communities. These were sturdy, often sentimental songs that used to be sung in the bars or hash houses of Istanbul and Athens, and they were interspersed with well-chosen readings by the actor Philip Arditti, dealing with anything from druggy musicians to the Anatolian wars.

Aslan started with Greek songs, then brought on the excellent She'koyokh band to show how the material might sound with a klezmer/Balkan backing, and ended with a furious Turkish singalong, which led to excited demands for songs in Kurdish from many of her supporters.

This was an emotional musical history of the eastern Mediterranean as seen by a mortissa - an independent woman determined to throw off her veil and have fun. - The Guardian Newspaper

Nata in Turchia, a Istanbul, approdata a Salonicco, nel suo sangue corrono molte culture, molti stili di vita e pensiero. Ascoltare oggi Çiğdem Aslan significa riflettere su un mondo passato

Fino a poco tempo fa la parola "rebetiko", almeno in Italia, suonava sconosciuta. Poi l'ha presa in considerazione Vinicio Capossela con il suo ultimo album "Rebetiko Gymnastas" e qualcosa in più s'è saputo. Tuttavia i non addetti ai lavori, chi non si occupa regolarmente di musica, brancolano ancora nel buio.
Mortissa

Il rebetiko, in due parole, è un movimento, una filosofia di vita, un paradigma esistenziale e musicale, riferibile a un preciso istante della storia moderna: quello di poco successivo alla fine della Prima guerra mondiale, con la fuga in massa da Smirne dei greci. Fu una vera catastrofe umanitaria per le tante persone che si ritrovarono nella cosiddetta patria di origine, completamente incapaci di riadattarsi alla nuova realtà sociale, con una parlata che a stenti veniva compresa e con usi e costumi diversi dagli autoctoni.

Una vita difficilissima, molti morirono di stenti e droga; e molti altri cercarono proprio nella musica lo stratagemma per sfuggire a un'apocalisse non prevista. Fra questi c'erano uomini, donne, vecchi, giovani e bambini, come Mortissa , figura emblematica del mondo ellenico moderno, donna di grande carattere, volitiva, potente, lontana da qualunque accettazione del nuovo mondo: una vera ribelle che non disdegnava i vizi, il bere, il fumo, il sesso, contro ogni pragmatica presa di coscienza. Ed è proprio a questo incredibile personaggio - ben decantato da un'altra beniamina del pubblico greco, Rosa Eskenazi - che è dedicato l'ultimo album di Çiğdem Aslan, meravigliosa rivelazione del mondo musicale incentrato sul dinamismo pentagrammato che, volenti o nolenti, lega Atene a Istanbul, con fronzoli che rimandano addirittura all'Armenia e a parte dei territori caucasici.
Meticciato

Nata in Turchia, a Istanbul, approdata a Salonicco, nel suo sangue corrono molte culture, molti stili di vita e pensiero. Non a caso canta disinvoltamente in quattro o cinque lingue diverse. Naturalmente il turco, il greco, il bulgaro… Ascoltare oggi Çiğdem Aslan significa riflettere su un mondo passato, e poter contare su un testimone serio e preparato, in grado di ridare lustro a vecchie canzoni e melodie.

Molti brani rebetiko circolano anche online, su Youtube , per esempio, ma Çiğdem li ha saputi riadattare al corso dei tempi, conferendogli lo smalto ideale per renderli credibili e piacevoli da ascoltare; non più solo capricci da etnomusicologi, ma vere e proprie canzoni attuali alle quali far riferimento come accade con ciò che la radio propone abitualmente. "Sono canzoni vitali, contenenti storie importanti da raccontare e diffondere", dice Çiğdem. "Le mie radici musicali e culturali, del resto, mi permettono di attingere facilmente a esse, offrendomi l'opportunità di rielaborare storie diverse, come diversi vorrei che fossero i miei ascoltatori". Un tempo si cantavano soprattutto nelle carceri elleniche, poi sono divenute di dominio pubblico, passando dai bassifondi di Atene e Salonicco, alle televisioni nazionali.
Le taverne di Istanbul

"La proposta di Aslan è fresca, brillante; le sue performance sono esemplari, grazie anche alla sua bellissima voce", dice Simon Broughton, di Songlines Magazine . Cerys Matthews, della BBC Radio, la definisce un'artista "infettiva" e "incredibile". La sua esperienza musicale si evolve contemporaneamente agli studi d'inglese, che effettua presso l'Università di Istanbul, esibendosi con il suo "blues greco" in bar e taverne. Nel 2003 vola a Londra, dove incontra i membri del Dunav Balkan Group, attivo dagli anni Sessanta, con cui si lega per vari progetti artistici. Si esibisce in importanti location, fra cui la Royal Albert Hall di Londra e il Pergamon Museum di Parigi. Intraprende la carriera solista nel 2009, con l'album Song of Smyrna . Con lei ci sono anche Pavlos Melas, alla chitarra e Pavlos Carvalho, al bouzouki. Altrettanto importante il suo lavoro con She'koyokh, ensemble di jewish music, coinvolto anche nell'ultimo lavoro.

Il nuovo disco prodotto da Asphalt Tango di Berlino (la stessa label di Balanescu Quartet e Fanfare Ciocarlia , di cui abbiamo parlato nei mesi scorsi) è, dunque, un caleidoscopio di suoni e colori, atmosfere e - se fossimo tutti sinestetici - potremmo probabilmente percepire anche dei profumi pungenti e inebrianti, tipici di alcune spezie che si usano oltre le porte che aprono sul mondo balcanico.

Inizia con la celeberrima " Aman Katerina Mou ", leggendario brano rebetiko composto da Panaglotis Toundas e tradotto in turco da Cengiz Onural; dove il rimando al cosmopolitismo musicale mediterraneo e alla storia che l'ha contraddistinto negli ultimi cento anni è palese. La melodia evoca tanto l'oriente quanto l'occidente, con quella tradizionale punta di amarezza tipica di brani che descrivono eventi storici in cui la catastrofe e l'affronto all'umanità hanno avuto il sopravvento. "Vale Me Stin Agalia Sou" è un brano del compositore e paroliere Vangelis Papazoglou, nato nei pressi di Smirne nel 1896, con rimandi alla musica folk ottomana. Molto interessante anche la nona traccia, "Cakici". E' un traditional che evoca la vicenda umana di Cakici Mehmet Efe, fuggito fra le montagne dopo l'assassinio del padre. Qui diventa un fuorilegge alla Robin Hood, e la sua leggenda è ancora oggi legata alla lotta contro i soprusi patiti dalla povera gente. - Balcanicaucaso

Cigdem Aslan nous convie ici à un voyage au cœur du rebétiko, ce répertoire de chansons grecques et turques passionnées, apparu dans les turbulentes années 20 et 30. Née à Istanbul de parents kurdes, Cigdem s’est installée à Londres en 2003 et a intégré en 2008 She’Koyokh, groupe de musique klezmer, présent ici sur trois titres. Sous la direction du joueur de qanun Nikolaos Baimpas se mêlent instruments traditionnels (santour, oud, violon, bouzouki) et modernes (contrebasse, guitare, clarinette). Pas de revival ici, mais une relecture moderne de vieux classiques de ce blues de la mer Egée empreint de nostalgie, de douleur mais aussi de joie, portée par les modulations aux influences orientales marquées de la voix de Cigdem. Une voix profonde et magnifique qui peut sans doute apporter au rébétiko une audience élargie. - Mondomix

You want a mix of cultures? This lady does what governments have been failing at for years-bringing peace and understanding between Greece and Turkey. Vocalist Cigdem Aslan sings in Greek and Turkish on this collection of songs from the early 20th Century along with traditional instruments such as the clarinet, finger cymbals, guitar, bouzouki, baglama and violin. The music mixes folk music for listening to in smoky clubs, such as the enchanting “Nenni (Lullaby)” or sounds for forming a circle with your friends, slapping the bottom of your foot and doing a dance as on “Aman Katerina Mou.” Aslan’s voice is rich, earthy and penetrating, as sweet as a watermelon and as strong as a demitasse of coffee at mid afternoon. The intoxicating rhythms on “Bir Allah” and “Pane Gia To Praso” will make your head swirl like the flavors in a Greek kitchen. Even though you won’t understand the words (yes, there are translations in the enclosed booklet), it won’t matter, as you can feel what Aslan’s saying in a way that words can’t describe. Get her on a tour to So Cal! Opa! - Jazz Weekly

Istanbul-born singer Cigdem Aslan’s album Mortissa is a shout-out to the strong women and freedom fighters in Turkey and Greece in the 1920s and 30s, when the music of the underground, rembetiko, was banned on both sides for being too Arabic. If that doesn’t grab you, nothing will. It’s haunting, plaintive, rivetingly emotional stuff, with echoes of both klezmer and Egyptian melodies along with its obvious Greek and Turkish roots. This so-called “Anatolian blues,” with its bitter ironies and double meanings, was the stoner soundtrack to the revolutionary underworld that rose up in Smyrna, and Istanbul, and port cities on the Aegean almost a century ago. Aslan is an aptly cosmopolitan choice to revisit these songs, a woman of Kurdish descent who’s made a name for herself in the UK singing klezmer music from across the Jewish diaspora. To paraphrase Edward Said: orientalism, the ultimate source of all good musical things.

Aslan sings in both Greek and Turkish, although you don’t have to speak either to enjoy this music, and Aslan’s delivery often transcends any linguistic limitations: it’s not hard to figure out where the songs are coming from. Is the haunting, dirgelike Ferece (Veil) about a funeral, or a wedding? Actually, neither. It’s sung from the point of view of a Muslim woman who wants to tear off her oppressive burqa, Nikos Angousis-Doitsidis‘ searing clarinet lines mirroring the vocals‘ simmering rage. Likewise, Bir Allah (One God), Aslan’s imploring melismatics mingling with Pavlos Carvalho’s biting bouzouki. Aslan shifts in a split second from jaunty to pensive, especially on the shapeshifting To Dervisaki (Little Dervish), with its fiery succession of solos from the bouzouki to Makis Baklatzis’s violin to the clarinet. Aslan does the same on the album’s towering, angst-ridden final cut, S’agapo (I Love You), Nikolaos Baimpas’ kanun rippling over the gusty swells of the orchestra.

Aslan sings with a nonchalantly crystalline tone over a bouncy minor-key pulse on Aman Katerina Mou (Oh My Katerina), then she veers between coy and inquisitive on the rhythmically tricky, chromatically edgy Vale Me Stin Agalia Sou (Take Me In Your Arms). Pane Gia To Praso (Going Out For Leeks – 1920s Greek slang for hashish) spirals downward on the wings of some of the album’s most gorgeous bouzouki riffage beneath Aslan’s eerily glimmering microtones. The catchy Trava Vre Manga Kai Alani (Go Away, Manga) has echoes of klezmer,while the stark bouzouki and vocal lines added a surreal, crepuscular creepinesss to Nenni (Lullaby). There’s also a slinky levantine ensemble piece, a lush pastorale, a bitterly anthemic barroom scenario where Aslan tells her suitors to take a hike, and the enigmatic Girl from Usak, sort of a Turkish circus rock shuffle with a kanun solo that might be the album’s most exhilarating moment. Where can you hear this masterpiece online? It’s not at Grooveshark or Bandcamp but it is on Spotify, and there are a couple of tracks up at Asphalt Tango Records’ - New York Music Daily

Slight of form but full of content, Çiğdem Aslan is a lioness of Greek and Turkish song. She sashayed onto stage last night with a red flower in her hair and an eightpiece band of fine musicians. She transformed The Vortex into a rebetiko club, with the audience sipping raki and hanging on every note. Maybe it helped that the venue is handy for London’s Greek and Turkish communities — and certainly many were singing along — but this was the third sell-out night and the music is clearly reaching out to a wider audience. Someone had come over from Amsterdam, having heard her on Radio 3.

Aslan is singing the shared Greek and Turkish repertoire born of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Generally known as rebetiko, this was the music of an underclass, but Aslan chooses the beautiful love (or lost-love) songs over those about crime and hashish. They have a more lasting value. Many are playful and coquettish, but the most beautiful are the slow ones with curling melodies like To Dervisaki (Little Dervish). She even included one, more folk-like, song in her native Kurdish language.

But this is ensemble music and around Aslan’s charismatic performance are some spectacular musicians — notably Pavlos Carvalho on bouzouki, Pavlos Melas on guitar and vocals, and Nikos Baimpas on kanun, the plucked zither that adds a filigree brilliance to this music like a curtain of shimmering beads. He played some spectacular solos. Aslan’s final song, Cile Bulbulum, about enduring the tribulations of life, shows she is both a lioness and nightingale. - Evening Standard - live review

Ҫiğdem Aslan was born in the cultural crossroads of Istanbul. She moved to London, hoping to advance her onstage and classroom studies in various musical cultures; these studies include her Songs of Smyrna project, which celebrates rebetiko and sephardic music from Turkey, and joining the She'Koyokh Klezmer Ensemble and the Balkan group Dunav. Mortissa is her solo debut, composed of rebetiko and smyrniac songs (often called "the blues of the Agean") from the 1920s and '30s. "Most of the songs are in Greek," she explains, "and I didn't know the meaning when I first heard them. It was the music I could relate to. I felt close to them even if I didn't understand a word. Once I learned what they were about, it was even better. Most of them are love songs. They're familiar to me in the way they express things. The way a woman tells off her lover is similar to what I heard in Turkey."

Aslan recorded most of Mortissa with aces from North London's Greek and Turkish musical communities, including kanun (plucked dulcimer) master Nikolaos Baimpas; She'Koyokh backs up the rousing sing-along "Trava Vre Manga Kai Alani (Away With You, Manga)" and head-spinning clarinet jam "Ferece (Veil)."

"Kanarini (Canary)" sings a beautiful vocal and instrumental melody nourished by Middle Eastern percussion and strings. Like an impending storm, "To Dervisaki (Little Dervish)" grows more intense as violin, guitar and clarinet twist and bow in a dance with Aslam's vocal, so overwhelmingly mysterious that it sounds a bit dangerous.

"Nenni (Lullaby)" will stop you dead in your tracks. Aslan's unaccompanied vocal introduction is so perfect it's bewitching; beautiful, mysterious, vibrant, haunting, evocative—her voice is all these and more. Starkly illuminated by the backup of a solitary acoustic guitar, Aslan's vocal leaves in its wake the sense that "Nenni" is a vocal incantation passed down from voice to voice, from person to person, from generation to generation

Mortissa is more than music: It is an open window into different cultures and histories. "What I'm doing is adding details and highlighting the similarities between the cultures," Aslan concludes. "Even something like a double bass in there makes it more modern. It's adding your personality. What I'm doing is putting my feelings into the songs, trying to reflect what they make me feel."

"It shows there are no cultural boundaries in music. - All About Jazz

Speaking of crosscurrents involving Greece: a Turkish singer from a Kurdish family named Cigdem Aslan has made a specialty of singing Greek rembetiko, the street music from the 1920s and '30s. The style evolved in the Greek communities in now-Turkish cities like Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople, or more frequently in the Greek of the time, simply "I Poli" [The City]) and, later, also in Athens and Piraeus, after a disastrous "population exchange" in 1923 between the two countries, in which both expelled their respective ethnic and religious minorities.


The lyrics of rembetiko are largely concerned with what you'd expect from urban music — love, loss and poverty, plus the pleasures of doing drugs and dodging the cops. (Rembetiko often gets equated to American blues, not without reason.) And considering what was once the free flow of music, culture and food between various communities in this region, it's not so surprising that many of the same melodies come up again and again on record with both Greek and Turkish lyrics. One such example is Aslan's version of "Kanarini" (Canary), sung here in both languages by Aslan and bandmate Paul Melas. Aslan possesses the smokiness that marks a true rembetiko singer: You can get lost in the sound of her voice. But her rendition takes a more relaxed pace than the bright tone and impossible vocal ornamentation (not to mention the artificially added bird twitters) of the recorded version of this song, made by the queen of rembetiko, Greek-Jewish artist Roza Eskenazi, in 1934. - NPR

Singing with liquid grace, her voice is dark and smooth in the ballads, yet darts like a sparrow on the dance numbers. She is backed by gifted musicians, on a variety of instruments, who understand her vision. Not a note sounds forced or unnecessary. Take a bow, Cigdem. Songlines Top of the World 4 STARS **** - Songlines Magazine

This album is a major work in traditionally-based music, and should deservedly bring the artist who made it to international fame - fRoots Magazine