Esengül ‎| Gizli Yaram

[UPDATE: New link in comments]

This remarkable woman was born Ağan Esen in 1954 in Istanbul, began her career working in casinos in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, and died in a car accident near Ataköy. 

Whether it really was an accident is up for debate, however; Adil at Uludag Video in Brooklyn, where I picked this delicious cassette up last weekend, assured me that Esengül was rubbed out by the mob. She had, less than three weeks prior, witnessed the owner and a waitress in a casino where she was gigging assassinated.

Esengül was 24 years old. Her voice sounds much, much more seasoned. You can hear a different sent of tracks by her in this week's Bodega Pop Live broadcast, here.

Link to DL in the comments.

What do you think? I'd love to hear from you ...

Orhan Gencebay | Klasikleri 1966-1993

Get the double album here.

Someone, somewhere--in conversation, an email or in the Bodega's Comments Aisle--recently expressed their thrill of Xtremely mustachioed Orhan Gencebay, whose Layla Ile Mecnun I added to the shelves back in April, here.

This 2-CD set, which I picked up almost a decade ago at a Turkish media store in lower midtown that my poet / translator friend Murat Nemet-Nejat took me to, is a nice introduction to the legendary singer / composer / actor's work.

I tried uploading "Ayşen" for you to listen to, but Divshare seems to be having trouble today (not, apparently, working on Labor Day, ha), so here's a music video of the same song:

Oğuz Yılmaz | Uğur Böceğim

Listen to "Küme Düşersin"

Listen to "Kıskananlar Çatlasın"

Get it all here.

My first exposure to Oğuz Yılmaz was through a cassette tape that I found god knows where probably 15 years ago. Born in 1968 in Ankara, Yılmaz sings a kind of amped up Turkish folk or arabesque, similar in some ways to the great Ibrahim Tatlises.

This CD, which I found at Uludag Video (1922 Ave W, Brooklyn) several years ago remains one of my all-time favorites, for the complex coloration of the music and the ear-popping expressiveness of Yılmaz's voice. (Give a listen to the second sample above and wait a while until the vocals kick in.)

Orhan Gencebay | Leyla Ile Mecnun

First, you sort of need to take a quick peek at this page. Yeah, now's fine. Right. [Dead air, 12 secs.] Okay. Are you back? Yes? No, no, that's fine. I'll wait. Yeah, no--I encourage you to, uh. Right. Great. Okay. [Crickets, 35-40 secs.] So. We good? Kay. Now, with the after-burn of all those mustaches smoldering in your retinas, take a sweet, long listen to this:

Listen to the title song of this CD

I'm almost positive I found this much-sought-after CD at a Turkish music store in the lower east 20s of Manhattan in, like, 2000 or thereabouts. The poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat took me there and I'm almost pretty sure he encouraged me to pick up this CD, because (a) he knew I liked what little Turkish arabesque I'd previously heard and (b) I remember him detailing the Layla and Majnun story that, clearly, this album is named after.

I don't listen to this album often, but when I do pull it out, I'm always amazed by the ethereal guitar work and the smooth soulfulness of Gencebay's voice. A really nice way to begin a lazy Sunday morning. 

Get kit and caboodle here.

Ibrahim Tatlises | Haydi Söyle

"Saza Niye Gelmedin"

Get the whole CD here.

Apparently, in March, the great Kurdish Turkish singer/actor Ibrahim Tatlises was shot in the head. He is reportedly recovering and may lose the use of one half of his body.

Randomly discovering Tatlises' Haydi Söyle in the 90s completely changed my life; this blog, among other things, is very much a direct result of that. Here, in fact, is the first posting to BodegaPop, sometime last year (before I learned how to zip whole CDs for downloading):

In the mid 1990s I was living on Grand Avenue near the corner of Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minn. My (now ex-) wife, Marta, and I had moved there from San Francisco in 1991 following a near-death experience on the 2 or 3 train while on our honeymoon in New York City. We were in our late 20s.

That move had been the worst mistake either I or Marta had ever made. We were both California born and raised, we loved the Bay Area, we knew nothing of the American Midwest, had no particular interest in it, but moved rather abruptly when our post-traumatic stress symptoms refused to subside six months after our Brooklyn subway fire experience. We convinced ourselves that moving to a boring, medium-sized city in the middle of nowhere would be the late 20th century American equivalent to taking a European spa after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Other than a handful of truly life-saving friends, I hated the Twin Cities. But I somehow convinced myself that I was there for the long haul, and immersed myself in the local culture--at least that portion of which I could stomach. Basically, the music scene. The Replacements had broken up by then and the bands that followed in their wake--Babes in Toyland, The Gear Daddies, Trip Shakespeare, The Tropicals--weren't great, but sufficed, at least so long as I kept my horizons limited to a radius of 50 miles, give or take, either side of the Mississippi.



One day in the late summer or early fall of 1994 I made a trip I often made, the 15-20 minute walk from my apartment on Grand Avenue around the corner and down Snelling to Cheapo Records and Tapes (now Cheapo Discs). I loved Cheapo. It was, at least at the time, cheap. You could get pretty much any used cassette tape you wanted (I hadn't yet made the switch to CDs) for a couple of bucks. And Cheapo tended to have close to everything.

On this particular day, for whatever reason, I couldn't find a single tape I wanted or didn't already have. Nothing spoke to me. Until--eh, what?--my eyes rested on the cover of a very light blue cassette sporting the image of a middle eastern-looking guy with a big black mustache smiling confidently into the camera. "Ibrahim Tatlises" read the semi-florid script in reverse-out white over his head. I had no idea what language the title ("Haydi Söyle") was in. The red price tag read "$1." Fuck it, I thought. I pulled it from the shelf and walked over to the register.

At home, I popped the cassette into my ghetto blaster, hit PLAY and pretty much resolved to (a) never, ever, EVER again settle for lame American pop music and (b) to move out of the Twin Cities at the earliest possible convenience (another three years, as it turned out, for New York).



An incredible performance on TV from around the time of Haydi Söyle's release

Postscript
Ibrahim Tatlises, though I didn't know it then, is a Kurdish/Turkish superstar. A film actor and arabesque singer, his down-and-out roots (his family was homeless when he was born in 1952) are part of the semiotics of his mystique.

After a few years of living in Brooklyn I discovered Uludag Video (1922 Avenue W, Brooklyn), where I picked up numerous CDs by Tatlises, including Haydi Söyle, so I could finally listen to it in my iPod. Alas, the last time I stopped in, late last fall, I was informed that they can no longer afford to carry CDs and are concentrating now solely on pirated DVDs of Turkish films.