31f The Turkish Café
In this issue, we feature two bands reviving the cross- cultural café music from the turn of the last century, when rembetiko was being born. Nick Hobbs meets Turkey’s Cafe Aman Instanbul.
K
alan Records have released a couple of archive rembetiko albums over the years but Café Aman Istanbul’s Fasl-i Rem- betiko (Rembetiko Fasils) is the first by a contemporary band. I hope it’s a sign that the time has come for this won- derfully languorous music to reach a wider audience, just like its distant Por- tuguese cousin – fado – has.
Rembetiko (also rembetika, rebetiko and rebetika, but Café Aman call it rem- betiko so let’s stick with that) evolved as a synthesis of Turkish and Greek café musics in the taverns of Ottoman harbour cities – Istanbul and Smyrna (Izmir) especially – and then transplanted itself to Piraeus, Salonika and New York with the tragic population movements of the Greco- Turkish war of 1918-22. Traditionally, it’s sung in Greek, and the quite un-Turkish bouzouki is a mainstay of its sound. But it’s a hard music to pin down, as it crosses over so naturally with Turkish fasil.
There’s something you could call a rembetiko feel. The accompanying drink
is raki, and raki is a drink which encour- ages mellow oblivion. Rembetiko and its dances feel stately, the tempo (mostly slow) and mood (mostly formal) don’t change much, but that doesn’t mean that the music lacks passion. There’s plenty of that but it’s restrained, the vocal style and the music have a sense of constancy, the verses and choruses glide into each other. Musically, rembetiko feels Western and Eastern at the same time. Its plea- sures are subtle ones and all the more rewarding as a result.
On the album the band has eight members: Styelo Berber (vocals), Pelin Suer (vocals), Atalay Durmaz (violin), Erdem S
¸entürk (oud), Serkan Mesut Halili (kanun), Neyzen Özsari (double bass), Ersin Killik (percussion) and Dimitris Lappas (bouzou- ki, cura, baglamadaki and acoustic guitar).
Styelo, Ürün Eren (interpreting) and I met just before the Orthodox Easter to mourn and celebrate Istanbul’s lost Greek culture in a café (definitely not a Café Aman) a stone’s throw from the Aya Triada Church where Styelo works as a singer.
“Pelin is Turkish but she started learn- ing Greek before we met [it’s very unusual for ‘ethnic Turks’ in today’s Turkey to speak Greek]. She’s also a musician. Music brought us together. She’d lived in Greece for a while. I met her in Babylon [an Istanbul club] while working with the accordeonist Muammer Ketenco˘
glu. Pelin wanted to learn rembetiko, he introduced us.”
“I was born in Turkey but went to uni- versity in Athens. I had a chance to meet Domna Samiou. She is [was… she died in March] one of the greatest collectors and performers of Greek folk music. We invit- ed her to a concert on Imbros [one of the few substantial Aegean islands which is Turkish rather than Greek]. After she heard me, she wanted to include me in her band, and I started to learn Greek folk music. The kind which in Greece is per- formed too little. It was a great chance for me. In my university years, I performed both rembetiko and folk music. In 1999 I returned here to attend the Conservatory. But things didn’t go well, I couldn’t finish. Now I’m continuing.”
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