Erdal Erzincan

Sufism · Bağlama · Alevi Song

Turkish bağlama player, singer and composer, born in Erzurum in 1971. He studied from 1985 at the music school of Arif Sağ and from 1989 at Istanbul Technical University, and helped develop the şelpe technique, which plays the bağlama with the fingers rather than a plectrum. He sings from the Alevi repertoire, in which that instrument is held to be sacred.

SufismTurkey

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About the artist

Erdal Erzincan

Alevism, or the Alevi-Bektashi tradition, is a religious tradition of Anatolia in its own right. It grew together from several sources and carries clear Sufi influences, but it is not a branch of Sunni Sufism and does not read itself that way. Its central rite is the cem, held in a cemevi with men and women together, where the deyiş are sung and the semah is turned. The bağlama accompanies all of it and is called the telli Kuran, the stringed Quran. He appears here under Sufism because that is the nearest path this site has.

With the Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor he recorded two duo albums for ECM, The Wind in 2006 and Kula Kulluk Yakışır Mı in 2013, both of them live recordings.

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