ID

The album cover says it all: a picture of the globe, the various continents composed of heads of human beings of varying colours, in the foreground a Picasso-esque woman's face with a white dove: and the word ID across it. The message is clear: The world is my passport. This is the gist of Efkan Şeşen's message on his 15th album, consisting of nine songs in nine languages: Turkish, Dutch, English, Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic, Pontian, Zazaki and Lazuri.

The songs are conveyed with a great deal of pathos and melodrama, with accompanying instrumental forays, reflecting the language at hand. Maybe the best is ‘Peyva Paşîn’, a Kurmanji (one of four Kurdish dialects) mountain song, which begins with barking dogs and tinkling sheep bells, then a kind of Kurdish kaval (flute) kicks in, followed by a sudden, soaring vocal flight, strummed saz, all summoning up the atmosphere of the craggy, sun-parched peaks of Kurdistan. Typically, the weakest songs are the ones that have nothing to do with the Anatolian world Şeşen knows best. ‘Het Nieuwe Leven’ (Dutch for The New Life) is a sentimental ditty in which Şeşen considers his five years in a new country. The weakest is predictably the English song, ‘We Must Stand as One’, which puts across a slightly sappy, vaguely communist ‘we are the world’ sentiment. At the risk of appearing curmudgeonly, ultimately, the nine songs beg the question: can, as Şeşen seems to suggest, music really build bridges between people? I think the jury is still out on that one.