Just come across the incredibly haunting and beautiful music of Turkish Canadian Sufi Mercan Dede the latest Album is called 'nefes' (breath)...
Mercan Dede believes that when you put digital, electronic sounds together with hand-made, human ones, you can create universal language, capable of uniting old and young, ancient and modern, East and West. It’s a bold claim, but the Turkish-born and Montreal-based musician/producer/DJ has the career and the music to back it up. When he takes the stage with his group Secret Tribe, he hovers at the side behind his turntables and electronics, occasionally picking up a traditional wooden flute, or ney to float in sweet, breathy melodies, while masters of the kanun (zither), clarinet, darbuka (hand drum) and whatever other instruments he’s decided to include that night, ornament his grooves and spin magical, trance melodies.
Mercan Dede is keen to bring his extraordinary music and stagecraft everywhere in the world because he feels its inclusive spirit carries a profound message of understanding and reconciliation. “I don’t like the separation,” says Dede. “The Sufi poet Rumi has a very good saying: ‘If you are everywhere, you are nowhere. If you are somewhere, you are everywhere.’ My somewhere is my heart. I try to figure it out. The rest—the hype, the trends—they are not important. Instead of talking about war in Iraq, if you can make a sound of a small instrument from an Iraqi village, you can tell people more about what is going on there. For me, the future is electronic and folkloric.”
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Mark, have you ever read Rumi? Some of his poems touch on Jesus. Makes for interesting reading, seeing Jesus through Muslim eyes.
Posted by: Matt Stone | 14/08/2006 at 13:11
Hey Matt, not a great deal and only online... I read a bit the other day re. Sufism... intresting how it seems to be almost the equivalent of Christian Mysticism within Islam... and perhaps suffers the same kind of risk... slipping into Gnosticism!
Posted by: Mark Berry | 14/08/2006 at 14:04