Karin

Armenian duduk (oboe) player Vardan Hovanissian and Belgian-Turkish singer and saz (lute) player Emre Gültekin recorded the beautiful album Adana together in 2015, marking the centenary of the Armenian genocide. This much more ambitious disc brings in more collaborators and includes Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish and Georgian music, which represents all the people who once lived in eastern Anatolia when it was more culturally diverse than it is now.

The title of this album is the old Armenian name for Erzurum, a large city in eastern Turkey that in the early 20th century had a large Armenian population. Hovanissian's grandfather was one of 200 survivors of the murders and deportations of 1915. Many of the tracks refer back to those days, but others reference more recent events like the murder of Alevis at a festival in Sivas in 1993 and migration tragedies in 2018. This might make it seem a gloomy affair, but much of the music is vibrant and the meeting of Armenian, Turkish and other musicians to produce something about overcoming historical barriers is uplifting. Often the music is melancholic but beautiful and dance-like numbers like ‘HamcHena Par’ and ‘Tamzara’ transcend the tragedy as only music can. This is a potential disc of the year.