The band Kırıka, apart from performing lively, energetic music that urges listeners to stand up and hum along is reforming the understanding of what Turkish music is by bringing the "sea breeze and the spirit of Dionysus," as they put it, back to Turkish music.
The band features Salih Nazım Peker on vocals and traditional instruments including cümbüş, cura, bağlama and buzuki; Hasan Devrim Kınlı on bass; Murat Ferhat Yegül on trombone, ney (reed flute) and backing vocals; and Orçun Baştürk on percussion and back vocals.

Their debut album is named "Kaba Saz," referring to the name given to Turkish music ensembles comprised of "loud" instruments that need to be played outdoors due their high volume, such as the drum, zurna, clarinet and brass instruments. So by naming their album "Kaba Saz," they both wanted to underline that all their instruments are literally "loud" and at the same time, the very song "Kaba Saz" reflects their rather "deconstructive" way of looking at life and themselves as musicians.

All the songs on the album -- except from a rendition of tamburi (tambur player) Cemil Bey's "Rast Zeybek" -- are Peker's original compositions. By looking at the instruments Peker plays and listening to the clarinet's beautiful Aegean touch, I would tend to call their music neo-rembetiko, a revival of the rembetiko period in Turkish music. However one should remember the origins of rembetiko -- the late Ottoman era during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the music scene in Turkey was flooded with Western forms such as kanto (canto), tango and operetta. Since "popular music for entertainment" was the spirit of the music at those times, and the music within which this entertainment was happening was achieved through songs formed in certain mode structures, it was definitely a genre to be called "urban folk music." This is exactly how Kırıka define their own music: an "urban folk" music wherein all songs have a maqam structure (classical Turkish music modes such as nihavent, saba, rast and hicaz -- which are interestingly also very popular modes in rembetiko). But what the lyrics talk about are more folksy in that they are intimate and talking about everyday stories in everyone's life. Mustafa Kamil Gök, a poet whose work remained unknown until his daughters published a little book of his poems after his death, is the author of all the lyrics on the album. Setting poems to music is an almost forgotten habit among musicians lately, so it is genuinely "cool" to do a revival of one of the most important aspects of "singer-songwriterdom" alongside reviving classical forms such as zeybeks, sirtos and çiftetellis. It is only when people compose and enrich the repertoires of such forms when people can be said to "continue" instead of "break with" a musical tradition reflecting one's heritage, as Peker states.

On the album there is a song called "Yıllar Geçti" (Years Passed By), which is a very nice Turkish tango. The genre has always been a form of tango distinct from the original Argentinean and thanks to Kırıka, Turkish tango has now been recovered from oblivion in new compositions.

While the use of strings such as tsouras, bağlama and buzuki in the song "Bir Sır Var Gülüşünde" (There is a Secret in Your Smile) maintains an indispensable romantic element in the band's music, the intensive use of drums, bass and the lively Balkan brass instruments make them so funky that a summer evening at an Aegean balcony overlooking the sea would be incomplete without Kırıka songs.

"Kaba Saz" by Kırıka Baykuş Music, 2008

Today's Zaman