Biography
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Years Active
1991 – present (33 years)
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Members
- Burhan Öçal
- Ekrem Bağı
- Ferdi Nadaz
- Fethi Tekyaygil
- Hüseyin Bitmez
The Istanbul Oriental Ensemble is a Turkish band playing traditional Turkish music in an oriental gypsy style.
The band's leader is Burhan Öçal. Though he is a multi-instrumentalist, in this band he generally plays the darbuka drum, which provides a rhythmic backdrop for improvisations by violin, clarinet, oud, and kanun. Öçal started the band (only one of his projects) in the mid-1990s to revive the old Turkish tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gypsy music. In Istanbul and Thracia, the European part of Turkey, gypsy music has played an important role in the Turkish music scene dating back to the tenth century.
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