By Roberta Davenport, *‘Sufi rocker’ Kağan Tayanç blends spirituality and rock in İstanbul* - Today's Zaman -Sunday, November 22, 2009
An unusual act took to the stage on Wednesday night at the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Ali Emiri Cultural Center -- a rock band including a neyzen that sang spiritually themed lyrics to Western harmonics.
The six-man act is known by the name of the lead singer and guitarist, Kağan Tayanç. With three guitars, a keyboard and a drum set in addition to vocals, the band generates a powerful sound onstage. A person approaching the concert hall entrance would doubtless understand that a rock concert was taking place, but unless they were to catch a slip of the ney -- a wailing reed flute instrument that in Turkey evokes thoughts of Sufi mysticism and the Mevlevi Sufi order -- they would have no idea that the songs being played are laden with spiritual themes.
The soft-spoken rocker spoke to Sunday’s Zaman at the concert venue and was careful to draw a distinction between the music he and his band make and “ilahi” music -- Sufi religious hymns.
“Ilahis are arabesque, and we’re very distant from that [style],” Tayanç said. “Ilahis are calm, tasawwuf music -- and our musical style is very loud, and so the two musical styles don’t come together. Our commonality is that our band includes a neyzen; but our [band’s] harmonies are Western.” Asked to describe what defines his band’s “Sufi rock” style, Tayanç says: “It’s rock music that contains spirituality. It’s oriented toward Islam and spirituality but is also a synthesis, including Western beats and harmony.”
And perhaps it may be said that rock is more suited for the themes Tayanç’s music is centered around. With lyrics reflecting the ups and downs human beings face throughout their lives and in their spiritual development, the band’s music seems appropriate -- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, with raging drums mixed in with furious strumming of the guitar overlaid by the soft sound of the ney -- the music is as tumultuous as life itself. There are ebbs and flows, and together with meaningful lyrics, it comes together beautifully.
The band’s repertoire comprised tracks from the “Yunus Gibi” (Like Yunus) album -- which takes its name from Yunus Emre, a 13th century Turkish poet and mystic.
Appropriately, though the band is known only by Kağan Tayanç’s name, its nickname is “Hicret,” a word that means journey and is also the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s exodus with the early Muslim community from Mecca to Medina to escape religious persecution. The name is meaningful in that it reflects the album’s contents -- chronicling a long and arduous journey with the aim of learning about God and steeping one’s self in Islam, Tayanç said.
The album cover reads: “Hicret is a difficult journey, one that leads from not knowing to knowing…” Tayanç says the lyrics in the album, when listened to carefully, also track his own journey from a non-religious leftist to a practicing Muslim:
“There were questions within me that were unasked,
And there was fear of the answers that would come,
From time to time thoughts are destroyed and broken,
But it’s difficult to turn back from some mistakes.”
(Gemiler/Yunus Gibi)
The Sufi rock concept
The idea of setting ilahi-type lyrics to rock or pop music is not a new one, but a band that specializes in this is new to the Turkish music scene. There have been examples of single-track covers by rock and pop bands of classic ilahis that everyone knows the words to, but nothing on the Turkish market is quite like Kağan Tayanç. The band’s music includes jazz, rock and ilahi elements, but in a new form; it also differs from the Anatolian rock genre in that it concerns itself with maintaining a spiritual outlook.
The term Sufi rock is new to Turkey, with conventional rock music combined with lyrics featuring Sufi music and imagery mostly an Indo-Pakistani phenomenon, with Pakistan’s wildly popular Sufi rock band Junoon being an example of widespread success of the genre.
And there are also parallels to be drawn between Sufi rock and the Christian rock subset in the United States. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the Kağan Tayanç group, which has been playing together for about six months, will be received by audiences as their name and reputation spreads. The audience at Ali Emiri was diverse, with attendees sporting everything from Led Zeppelin T-shirts to headscarves.
Tayanç explained that a follow-up album to “Yunus Gibi” was in the works and, conceding the difficulty of breaking out into the music scene with an entirely new genre and establishing a fan base would take some time, said that he saw the potential for his music to become popular in Turkey but that it would only be with the second or third album that this would be seen.
For those interested in checking out their eclectic new sound, Kağan Tayanç’s final concert of the year is set for 8 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the Ali Emiri Cultural Center in İstanbul’s Fatih district. For more information on the group and their music, visit http://www.yunusgibi.com [in Turkish].
An unusual act took to the stage on Wednesday night at the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Ali Emiri Cultural Center -- a rock band including a neyzen that sang spiritually themed lyrics to Western harmonics.
The six-man act is known by the name of the lead singer and guitarist, Kağan Tayanç. With three guitars, a keyboard and a drum set in addition to vocals, the band generates a powerful sound onstage. A person approaching the concert hall entrance would doubtless understand that a rock concert was taking place, but unless they were to catch a slip of the ney -- a wailing reed flute instrument that in Turkey evokes thoughts of Sufi mysticism and the Mevlevi Sufi order -- they would have no idea that the songs being played are laden with spiritual themes.
The soft-spoken rocker spoke to Sunday’s Zaman at the concert venue and was careful to draw a distinction between the music he and his band make and “ilahi” music -- Sufi religious hymns.
“Ilahis are arabesque, and we’re very distant from that [style],” Tayanç said. “Ilahis are calm, tasawwuf music -- and our musical style is very loud, and so the two musical styles don’t come together. Our commonality is that our band includes a neyzen; but our [band’s] harmonies are Western.” Asked to describe what defines his band’s “Sufi rock” style, Tayanç says: “It’s rock music that contains spirituality. It’s oriented toward Islam and spirituality but is also a synthesis, including Western beats and harmony.”
And perhaps it may be said that rock is more suited for the themes Tayanç’s music is centered around. With lyrics reflecting the ups and downs human beings face throughout their lives and in their spiritual development, the band’s music seems appropriate -- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, with raging drums mixed in with furious strumming of the guitar overlaid by the soft sound of the ney -- the music is as tumultuous as life itself. There are ebbs and flows, and together with meaningful lyrics, it comes together beautifully.
The band’s repertoire comprised tracks from the “Yunus Gibi” (Like Yunus) album -- which takes its name from Yunus Emre, a 13th century Turkish poet and mystic.
Appropriately, though the band is known only by Kağan Tayanç’s name, its nickname is “Hicret,” a word that means journey and is also the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s exodus with the early Muslim community from Mecca to Medina to escape religious persecution. The name is meaningful in that it reflects the album’s contents -- chronicling a long and arduous journey with the aim of learning about God and steeping one’s self in Islam, Tayanç said.
The album cover reads: “Hicret is a difficult journey, one that leads from not knowing to knowing…” Tayanç says the lyrics in the album, when listened to carefully, also track his own journey from a non-religious leftist to a practicing Muslim:
“There were questions within me that were unasked,
And there was fear of the answers that would come,
From time to time thoughts are destroyed and broken,
But it’s difficult to turn back from some mistakes.”
(Gemiler/Yunus Gibi)
The Sufi rock concept
The idea of setting ilahi-type lyrics to rock or pop music is not a new one, but a band that specializes in this is new to the Turkish music scene. There have been examples of single-track covers by rock and pop bands of classic ilahis that everyone knows the words to, but nothing on the Turkish market is quite like Kağan Tayanç. The band’s music includes jazz, rock and ilahi elements, but in a new form; it also differs from the Anatolian rock genre in that it concerns itself with maintaining a spiritual outlook.
The term Sufi rock is new to Turkey, with conventional rock music combined with lyrics featuring Sufi music and imagery mostly an Indo-Pakistani phenomenon, with Pakistan’s wildly popular Sufi rock band Junoon being an example of widespread success of the genre.
And there are also parallels to be drawn between Sufi rock and the Christian rock subset in the United States. For now, though, it remains to be seen how the Kağan Tayanç group, which has been playing together for about six months, will be received by audiences as their name and reputation spreads. The audience at Ali Emiri was diverse, with attendees sporting everything from Led Zeppelin T-shirts to headscarves.
Tayanç explained that a follow-up album to “Yunus Gibi” was in the works and, conceding the difficulty of breaking out into the music scene with an entirely new genre and establishing a fan base would take some time, said that he saw the potential for his music to become popular in Turkey but that it would only be with the second or third album that this would be seen.
For those interested in checking out their eclectic new sound, Kağan Tayanç’s final concert of the year is set for 8 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the Ali Emiri Cultural Center in İstanbul’s Fatih district. For more information on the group and their music, visit http://www.yunusgibi.com [in Turkish].
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