Abdallar’a Kalan / The Heritage of the Abdals

This special project, brought out by Turkey’s Kalan after three years of preparation, collects new recordings of 46 Abdal folk songs, demonstrating the vitality of a specific and influential tradition of Anatolian folk music. The performers include acknowledged masters and younger musicians recorded around the city of Kırşehir in central Anatolia; the rough, vibrant sound mirrors the burning urgency of the songs. Turkey’s Abdals descend from travelling dervishes that were widespread across the Ottoman Empire. Their traditional music, based on humanistic poems, has been extremely important in Turkish folk thanks to musicians like Neşet Ertaş and Hacı Taşan, both of whose songs feature here. The recordings utilise a variety of instruments including the bağlama (in two different tunings), violin, double-headed davul drum and the zurna. Voices and instruments mirror each other, commenting and embellishing, and the spontaneous heterophony supported by the insistent rhythm of a track like ‘Yolcu’ transmits the feeling of a common destiny. Its lyrics were written by Neşet Ertaş, whose pen name was the word Garip (Forlorn) as it appears in the song: ‘We cry like a forlorn nightingale / We are sad and resentful in the hands of ignorance / We are always travellers, as we come we will go / Is the world your homeland, is it your country?’ Kalan have made videos of the recordings available on their YouTube page.