Left, Dilber Ay; right, Büşra Pekin in the title role of the 2022 movie.

Flying on Turkish Airlines, to follow the safety video (Trailer for a thriller) and a dodgy dervish movie (note here), I’m also grateful to them for introducing me to arabesk [1] singer Dilber Ay (1956–2019), subject of a recent biopic (Ketche, 2022) that captivated me, even without subtitles. Here’s a trailer with German subtitles:

Dilber Ay was brought up in a Yörük-Kurdish tribe of Kahramanmaraş province, south Turkey. Her family migrated north to Ankara and then Düzce, where she was discovered by TRT scouts at the age of 13. Constantly abused at the hands of men, her story chimes in with what seems to be a dominant genre in Turkish cinema. This interview doubtless reads better in Turkish, but you get the gist…

Like much of the most moving music around the world (see e.g. under flamenco, or the Matthew Passion), Dilber Ay’s music expresses anguish—often stressing the theme of imprisonment, as in her Flash TV series Kadere Mahkûmları (Prisoners of fate, 2011–15). It’s always the plaintive slow laments that captivate me, often with exquisite free-tempo taksim preludes on violin. Two songs featured in the film:

• Antepten Ötedir:

• Meyrik (1981)

Among her other songs,

• Kader:

• Barak havasi, with further contributions on zurna:

• Deli gönül yastadır:

For more anguish, try Songs of Asia Minor, and Some Kurdish bards, under West/central Asia: a roundup.

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[1] I featured İbrahim Tatlıses under The call to prayer. On the changing arabesk scene, Izzy Finkel’s instructive BBC radio programme “Istanbul’s factory of tears” (2019) includes contributions from various singers and producers, as well as Martin Stokes, author of The arabesk debate (1992).