The Turkish Psychedelic Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980

165 Pages·2018·1.55 MB·English

by  Daniel Spicer

Contents
Preface
New Sounds for a New Society
Moğollar: The Legend of Mount Ararat
Cem Karaca: Poverty Is Not Destiny
Ersen: Don’t Look Down on Me, Brother
3 Hürel: Life’s Road Goes on Forever
Wednesday Morning in Kadıköy
Barış Manço: Rivers Run Through the Meadows
Edip Akbayram: A Wispy, Wispy Snow Falls
Selda: The Bitter Sound of Turkey
Bunalım: There Is a Stone, There Is a Dog
Erkin Koray: Electronic Ballads
The Jazz Parallel
A Trip to Unkapanı
The Axe Falls
Postscript
Notes
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
Back in the autumn of 2011, I was approached by The Wire magazine with a
commission to write a feature on Turkish psychedelic music of the 1970s. It was
to be the kind of article the magazine’s editorial team refer to as a primer – an
introduction and overview based around a selection of key recordings of my
choice. Being a dedicated freelance professional with an expensive record-
buying habit to fund, I agreed to write it, of course. But I didn’t mention the fact
that it was a subject I knew practically nothing about. In truth, I’d never really
heard anything about a Turkish psych scene. So, I began to dig around on the
internet to see what I could uncover.
I could barely believe my ears. The music I discovered was a major
revelation, and spoke to me in a powerful way. Here was a whole world of
hitherto uncharted sounds that blended several of my abiding musical passions:
psychedelia, progressive rock, funk and folk with distant echoes of Indian raga
and weird, non-Western tunings. It reminded me of a dream I’d had as a
teenaged comic book fanatic, in which I found an old-fashioned wooden chest
that turned out to be full of superhero titles I’d never even heard of. In fact, as I
researched the artists responsible for making these incredible sounds, I began to
realise I had indeed found my unknown superheroes: amazing, larger-than-lfe
characters parading improbable fashions, impressive moustaches and hairstyles
to die for.
It also quickly became apparent to me that there was a very real lack of
information available on the subject in the English language. I had to dig hard.
And that only added to the sense of this as elusive and tantalising arcana, a
forgotten entry in the annals of global counterculture, a rich social history just
out of reach. I soon understood that this was a story crying out to be told. This
book represents my attempt to tell that story, and an opportunity to correct a few
factual errors that, due to a scarcity of reference materials, regrettably found
their way into my original feature. However, this doesn’t aim to to be a
definitive history. Aficionados of the scene (and, believe me, they quickly made
themselves known to me with corrections and clarifications) may find that their
favourite artist hasn’t been covered. There’s no Hüsnü Özkartal Orkestrası in
these pages. Mid-’60s beat group Mavi Işıklar does not appear here. Influential
singer-songwriter Fikret Kızılok’s story will have to be told another day. Rather,
I offer an expansion of my initial primer – an introduction that, I hope, will
nurture in the reader the same passion and curiosity that this incredible music
has engendered in me.
Finally, there’s one more reason why this tale deserves to be told now. At the
beginning of the 21st century, we’re experiencing the full flowering of the
apocryphal Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” Trump, Brexit
and Turkey’s own President Erdoğan are gross manifestations of the
disorientating, often worrying and downright confusing era in which we find
ourselves. Yet, as the equally turbulent story of Anadolu Psych shows,
interesting times call for interesting personalities. We should always have room
for more heroes in our lives.
NEW SOUNDS FOR A NEW
SOCIETY
The Bosphorus straits bisect the city like an elemental wound. Huge industrial
ships and pleasure boats churn and whiten the dark blue waters. Minarets pierce
the thick mist on the surrounding hills, sharp needles scratching the sky. To the
east, huge, incalculable distances run off flatly into the body of Asia, fed by
tarmac arteries. Arriving in Istanbul by car over the Bosphorus Bridge, it’s easy
to understand how, for centuries, the city served as a teeming omphalos of world
culture; the centre of a deep, human vortex where civilisations collided and
merged; a disorientating kaleidoscope of East and West, North and South,
ancient and modern. This was Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman world. For
six hundred years, from the end of the 13th century, the Ottoman Empire was a
global super-power, stretching, at its height in the late 1600s, from the Danube to
the Nile, a vast and powerful Muslim land knocking at the doors of Christian
Europe, its opulent magnificence ruled over by the Sultan, absolute monarch,
answerable only to God.1
Yet, by the first decades of the 20th century, this proud Ottoman identity was
on shaky ground. Riddled with corruption and ennui, the Empire had been in
continual decline since the second half of the 18th century. At the same time,
nationalist sentiments had been growing among its many subject peoples, not
least the Kurds, leading to an increase in ethnic tension and outbursts of
violence. In 1918, defeat at the hands of the Allied Powers in the First World
War dealt a blow from which the Ottoman world would never recover. The
Empire finally collapsed, exhausted and dissolute, in November 1922, when the
Turkish Parliament overthrew Sultan Mehmed VI and officially abolished the
Sultanate, effectively ending 623 years of monarchical Ottoman rule. The
following year, the new Republic of Turkey emerged as a hopeful phoenix, led
by the distinguished military commander, and the Republic’s first President,
Mustafa Kemal – thereafter granted the honorific last name Atatürk (literally,
‘Father of the Turks’).
Atatürk immediately embarked on a programme of sweeping modernisation.
For centuries, with one foot in the Mediterranean and one in Asia Minor, Turkey
had served as a cultural bridge between Europe and the Middle East, leaving the
Ottoman people uniquely positioned to retain an essentially Muslim identity
while simultaneously absorbing Western influences. Now Atatürk’s reforms
enhanced the Republic’s separation from the Muslim world, branding Turkey a
secular state with liberal social attitudes, where the Roman alphabet and Western
clothing and fashions were enthusiastically embraced. At the same time, Ankara
became the Republic’s new capital and, not long after, ancient Constantinople
was officially given its Turkish name, becoming modern Istanbul. Atatürk’s
chief ideologist, Ziya Gökalp, set forth much of this thinking in his treatise The
Principles of Turkism, published in 1923, in which he outlined the desire to turn
away from Turkey’s Ottoman past and Arab neighbours and build a West-facing
Turkish identity. Moreover, music played a major part in this national
rebranding exercise. Gökalp understood that the modern Turkey needed to
discard Islamic-Ottoman music and connect with a truly Turkish art.
In the first instance, this meant a concerted break with the tradition of classical
Turkish music (klasik Türk müziği), also known as Turkish art music (Türk sanat
müziği). Originating around the 14th century, at the height of the Ottoman
Empire, classical Turkish music was initially performed in the palaces, mosques
and Sufi lodges of Constantinople and other major cities – and was intimately
entwined with Islamic thought. Compositions were based on a complex series of
modes called makams, each of which, in Sufi teaching, was said to represent and
convey a specific spiritual and psychological state. Even so, regardless of the
particular makam being used, classical Turkish music was generally slow, stately
and suffused with a sense of lingering, otherworldly melancholy. Primarily a
vocal music, performances traditionally featured a singer pouring out heart-
rending tales of love and loss, accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble –
traditionally a quartet of ney (end-blown flute), kemençe (pear-shaped, bowed
fiddle), kudüm (hand drum) and tambur (long-necked lute with two distinct
variants: mızraplı tambur, played with a plectrum; and yaylı tambur, played with
a bow). In form and function, these instruments can be seen as roughly
equivalent to the shehnai, sarangi, tabla and tamboura of Indian classical music,
respectively. In fact, aside from the instrumentation, classical Turkish music
shared three important characteristics with Indian raga: firstly, each makam was
more than simply a scale, but followed detailed rules of progression that strictly
delineated the order in which each note of the scale should be explored;
secondly, makams employed notes that sat in the microintervals between the
twelve semitones of Western music; and thirdly, any programmed sequence of
classical forms (known as a fasıl) always incorporated extensive instrumental
improvisation.
By the 20th century, this music was inextricably associated with Islamic-
Ottoman culture in the public imagination. Thus, Gökalp’s The Principles of
Turkism strongly advocated turning away from classical Turkish music towards
secular, pre-Islamic Anatolian folk music – that is, traditional music originating
in Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey. While Turkish folk music (Türk halk
müziği) had been immensely popular during the Ottoman era, it remained
untainted by the courtly and religious connotations attached to classical music,
offering an unbroken link to an idealised, Arcadian antiquity and deeply rooted
folk culture. Sensing its potential as a unifying force, Atatürk initiated a major
survey, tasked with classifying and archiving samples of folk music from around
Turkey. Between 1924 and 1953, Atatürk’s commission collected around ten
thousand folk songs – or Türkü (simply meaning ‘of the Turk’). Beneath this
umbrella term sat a myriad of sub-classifications including Koşma (a free-form
folk song usually dealing with themes of love or nature), Ağit (a lament), Dastan
(an epic), Mani (a traditional Turkish quatrain form) and many others. At the
same time, each region of Turkey boasted its own local instrumental dance
tunes, which went by multiple names, performed in varied costumes, somewhat
analogous to the English Morris dancing tradition. Yet, despite this dizzying
diversity, Turkish folk music was united by essential musical foundations. A
wide range of time signatures were used, from simple ones such as 2/4, ¾ and
4/4 to more complex times such as 5/8, 7/8, 9/8, 7/4 and 5/4 – while
combinations of basic rhythms often created more complicated compound times
such as 10/8 and 12/8. As in Turkish classical music, the scales used in Turkish
folk (called ayak, meaning ‘foot’), incorporated microtones, but did away with
strict rules of progression and varied in different regions of Turkey.
Instrumentally, too, folk music overlapped with Turkish classical. Traditional
folk wind instruments included the ney, the zurna (double-reeded woodwind
similar to the European shawm), sipsi (single-reeded, clarinet-like woodwind)
and tulum (droneless bagpipe). Stringed instruments included the kemençe
fiddle, the saz, bağlama and tar (all types of lute) and qanun (a kind of zither).
And percussion was supplied by the davul, nagara and darbuka (drums), the tef
(similar to a tambourine) and kaşık (wooden spoons).
This was precisely the rich and complex tradition that Gökalp’s treatise on
nascent Turkism sought to shore up and popularise with a 20th-century audience.
Yet, at the same time, he was convinced that any successful new Turkish music
would need to take the form of a synthesis with European classical music, which
he regarded as the pinnacle of Western civilisation. Thus, as far back as the
1920s, right from the beginning of the Republic, Turkish cultural thinkers were