Selda Bağcan | Anadolu Konserleri 1970, 1990

Today's cassette rip has no J-card, but I'm assuming what we have on hand is this. Published in 1991, it features two concerts, 20 years apart, by Turkish folk and rock superstar, Selda Bağcan. I found it, along with two dozen other cassettes from the 1980s and 1990s, at Uludag Video on Avenue W in Brooklyn. 

Uludag was one of my favorite places to stop by when I used to ride my bike all over south Brooklyn in the aughts; but I was told at one point that they would no longer be importing music. When I  moved further north to Queens in 2010, I just assumed they were dry, and never went back.

Technically, they probably haven't added anything new, but they seem to have put everything they may have had in storage back up on the right hand wall.

The owner, Adil, motioned me over to a bottom corner of the wall where he'd stashed about 50-75 cassettes, a third of which looked to be ca. 1980s. We talked about the history of his store as we pulled the cassettes from their hiding place and spread them out on a glass case below the CDs.

He lives in Bay Ridge, a 10-minute car ride away, and opened the place in 1985. The back wall, against which there is now a sea of blue evil eye jewelry, had at one time been all cassettes. As I set the older-looking titles off to one side, Adil took others he thought I might like and popped them in his novelty jukebox cassette player behind the register to give me a taste. 

And that was when I saw the Selda cassette. "Which Selda is that?" I asked.

"Anatolian Concerts," Adil explained. I expressed my surprise: I have a number of Selda CDs, most of them bought in this very store, and had no idea that she had put out a live album. I gingerly asked if he might be willing to sell it. Gingerly, because it was right there beside the cassette player, suggesting that he had most likely listened to it recently. But without hesitation, Adil said he'd be happy to sell it to me.

I haven't broken up the rip into distinct tracks because, while Selda performs numerous songs, there's no real break, except at the end of each side. Also, I assume you like Selda enough to just want to take in the whole thing. Right?

Expect many more posts from this haul in the weeks to come.

Link to rip in the comments.